


Color by Numbers

by vitoliel



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: BAMF Bucky Barnes, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes meets My Side of the Mountain, Dehumanization, Gen, How Do I Tag, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Protective Steve Rogers, Sam Wilson Is a Good Bro, Self-Harm, Steve Feels, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-08
Updated: 2014-12-23
Packaged: 2018-02-24 15:19:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 41,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2586269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vitoliel/pseuds/vitoliel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Soldier came up with the plan in his spare time, though he never actually believed he’d put it into practice. Hydra’s reach seemed too complete – too powerful – to actually consider running. But he thought about it.</p><p>And then the man stopped fighting. And he said he knew him. And the Soldier felt…felt… He knew what he felt was important.</p><p>So, he ran.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Раскрась сам](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6505498) by [Schwesterchen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schwesterchen/pseuds/Schwesterchen)



> Also known as the "Bucky Barnes meets My Side of the Mountain and discovers his Humanity" fic no one asked for.

A man is only whole when he takes into account his shadow.

_Djuna Barnes_

_*_

 

The DC sky burned, smoke and ash drifting across downtown, vehicles skidding to the roadside as drivers stuck their heads out their windows, eyes fixed on the collapsing giant.

The Soldier walked into the first large department store he crossed. He walked through the racks grabbing an armful of clothing – t-shirts, sweaters, a coat, jeans, jackets, a hat, gloves, and two backpacks. The salesladies and customers cowered in corners or ran into the streets, small hand held computers pointed at the mass collapsing into the river. Even from inside the building he could hear the screech of twisting metal and the crack of broken rock.

Stage one of the plan was Supplies.

He needed to get everything in one fell swoop because once he’d gone to ground he couldn’t resurface; not without drawing the combined focus of Hydra and Shield. He had to be quick, decisive, discrete.The other looters, the typical rabble that cropped during in local disasters, provided an excellent cover for the stolen items.

He waited until he was clear of the crowd to stop and strip the waterlogged sour leather and Kevlar. The clothes made a soggy, black mass in the corner. The Soldier pulled on the blue hoodie with the soft inside. Truthfully, the green with the water protection or the black and grey that faded into urban shadows would have been a better tactical choice but the blue was soft against his skin. He kept the other two in reserve.

He undid the zipper with his teeth and carefully maneuvered his bone hand into the sleeve.

His waterlogged guns needed a good cleaning to keep from rusting and his ammunition was limited. He could, theoretically, return to the maintenance bank or raid one of the numerous safe houses peppered throughout DC, but the agents equipped with trigger words made the risk unfavorable. He didn’t want to risk surveillance.

The Soldier pulled a cap low over his eyes and walked to a nearby Walmart. He filled his shopping cart with ball bearings, a long sheet of clear tarp, a box of water bottles, food stuff including a gigantic box of salt, and thirty glass mason jars with screw on lids. At Home Depot he filled it with rubber piping, nails, pipe cement, firecrackers, fishing line, card paper, bells like the kind store owners put on their door, three gallons of resin, and toy rockets.

He got makeup, bells, several dozen spools of hardy thread, and Halloween prosthetics from the local dollar store. The Soldier moved from one item to the next like a laser locked missile, only redirecting to avoid bumping elbows with other people in the store. He stood in line, a specter of a man, until a flash of happy color caught his eye. 

There was a small packet of gummy bears hanging about chest high. If he'd been a child-sized weapon, it would be directly at his eye line. The Soldier stared at the small packet as the line moved forward. They served no mission purpose. He needed to travel as light as he could. They were a distraction: person items, not weapon-approved. But he liked the colorful reds, greens and blues. The Soldier quibbled over it so long the woman at the register took compassion on him.

“Here,” she said, stuffing it into his bag without scanning it. Her eyes lingered on the bruises under his eyes and the stiff metal fingers hidden by his glove. “I got it covered, Hun. Just be safe when you’re driving, ok?”

Lastly he went to a gun store and bought four boxes of Russian sniper rounds and an AM-FM radio with a telescope antenna.

 

Stage two was Location.

By now his trail cut clear and wide deeper into DC where his handlers would deduce the Winter Solider was alive, active, and pursuing the mission. It satisfied his programming enough to allow him boost a car and leave the city. He put on the fake skin and used the makeup to define his cheeks and soften his eyes. The flesh colored putty widened his chin and lowered the brow of his nose, while the fake Halloween teeth changed the shape of his mouth. It would not pass close inspection but it would fool the roadside cameras.

The US-29 was packed with civilians scrambling to escape the devastation on the river. In the confusion and panic, Captain Rogers' attack had been labeled a terrorist threat. Newscasters pleaded with people to stay indoors while police and the military were beginning to set up blockades. It had only been four hours since Roger’s attack began and information at this point was chaotic and incomplete. The Soldier slipped through easily.

The Soldier kept to the back roads and avoided tolls or areas with camera monitoring. It added hours to his trip, but the sleep deprivation and endurance training held. He could stay awake for eighty-one hours without sacrificing minimum capability and concentration. He only needed forty-five.

He kept his left hand the seat beside him so the passing cameras wouldn’t catch the glint of his wrist exposed between the edge of his sleeve and the glove. Small towns turned into long fields of brown earth and sprouting new stocks of corn or rows of green alfalfa. In the distance the jagged peaks of the Tetons rose from the earth. When he was a hundred miles from his target destination he pulled into the woods and set up temporary camp.

The Soldier pulled out the resin and ball bearings. He mixed the two together in one of the gallon buckets until the bearings were evenly mixed in, and poured the mixture into all but one of the glass mason jars until it was an inch thick on the bottom.

While it hardened, Barnes cut even swatches of thick thread, each one about four feet long. He dipped them into the pipe cement and rolled them in gunpowder. The Soldier cannibalized parts of the car motor to make a spinning table. He carefully set one of the mason jars in the middle of the table and poured in another amount of resin.

The centrifugal force pressed the resin evenly against the walls of the glass. The Soldier let it spin until it hardened. He did the same with the other glass jars. When it was done the resin had hardened on the sides leaving an even open tube to the first layer of resin. He placed the jars back into the crates they came in, carefully wrapped in shirts and sweaters.

The Soldier pulled apart the rockets until he had twenty-five fire starters lined up on the tailgate. He cracked open the fireworks and poured the gunpowder into several white envelopes and set it aside. He put the fire starters in his backpack along with the envelopes of gunpowder.

Next, he ripped open the box of water bottles and stuck them into the backpacks, along with the fishing line and spools of thread. He opened the boxes of sniper rounds and poured the bullets into the smaller pockets and into the tiny spaces between items.

He placed the fuses into the long tarp and rolled it up tight like a sleeping bag before strapping it into the top of the backpack with the rubber tubing.

He filled the second backpack with the nails, bells and the radio. He put the heavier backpack on the front and slung his riffle and box of gasoline across his back. The lighter backpack went on top of that.

It had been forty hours since the attack on the Helicarriers.

The Soldier pulled out a 300ml white pill and bit it in half, carefully licking up the crumbled powder before storing it in a pocket. The bitter taste flooded his mouth and he grimaced.

It bought him 16 hours.

The Soldier left the car in a ravine covered by leaves and dirt and set off on foot.

 _*_

Wyoming was miles from DC, miles from New York. Filled with wide-open spaces covered by desert, trees, tall grass, and tall looming mountains there was plenty of game and the people were accustomed to living miles away from each other. No one would look for the Soldier here.

He’d come up with the plan in his spare time though he never _actually_ believed he’d put it into practice. Hydra’s reach seemed too complete – too powerful – to truthfully consider running.

But he thought about it.

Sometimes before missions he examined the routes to Wyoming as closely as he examined security and sightlines to his target. If he _did_ run, hypothetically, he knew it had to be as carefully calculated as a 2000 yard sniper hit. Just as he’d calculate humidity, wind speed, gravity, and clarity the second before he pulled the trigger he had to consider food, weapons, shelter, and counter-surveillance the moment he went dark.

Technology improved in leaps and bounds between Sleeps. He had to incorporate those improvements into his plan every time he woke up; this decade he had to think about satellites, cell phones, tracking chips, and cameras.

Few people carried cash anymore and credit cards were traced so pick pocketing was a lot of risk for little reward. Cities were regulated more than ever – tax payments, phones bills, parking tickets; paper trails everywhere. You couldn’t buy a bagel without leaving an outline of your existence. Eventually, he decided he had to get as far away from the cities as he could.

New York was long and narrow, but his handlers always paid special attention to him for New York missions. They expected something from him and therefore he could never go there. The same applied to Chicago, Texas, and more recently California.

Wyoming was a blank space in his mental canvas.

There were a few missions – hits against witnesses in marshal protection, a few blown up safe houses near Kalispell, but they were minor assignments meant to shake off the rust and help the Soldier adapt to a new era.

Yes, he decided. If he ever did run it would be to Wyoming.

Not that he would, of course.

It was, the Soldier acknowledged as he bent over maps and eyed the topographic maps of the mountains and valleys of the Teton Mountains, his handlers droning on in the background, an impossible fantasy but it kept him entertained.

Then the Man happened. The man who stopped fighting; who said the Soldier knew him. He didn’t but he felt something surge up within anyway. Some deep, primal instinct that this man was Important. Vital.

Hydra in chaos because of Project Insight and the handlers scrambling to regroup, he realized that Hydra’s reach was, for the moment, crippled. It was protocol for the Soldier to go dark after such a huge disaster so he would not be missed until 1400h on Tuesday at which time he was meant to rendezvous with Strike Team Delta.

And the man had stopped fighting.

He said he knew him.

And the Soldier felt…felt…

He knew what he felt was important.

So. Wyoming.

 

It took longer than he thought to reach the mountains.

The Soldier searched for an outcropping with a decent amount of rock over the gap and a nice cover of trees outside. The outcropping had to be deep enough to hide from satellite imaging, but not so deep it was attractive to unknown beasts such as bears or cougars. It had to be several miles away from man made trails and any hunting stands or camping sites, and it had to be close to fresh, running water. The closer to the mountains the better as the cliffs and jutting rock distorted radio signals and made it difficult for the satellites to pick up his tracking chip.

It was a long list of requirements, but the Soldier had accumulated a lot of time to study topographical maps over the last few decades.

He discovered the prefect cave seven miles up the mountain near where a river, flooded and fed by thawing ice and snow, turned into a waterfall. The cave was small, only six feet at the deepest point, and four feet high at the tallest. Its opening was less of an arch than a slash in the rock. He didn’t find any fresh animal tracks or scat.

He was running out of time.

The Soldier quickly stripped out of the heavy bags. He carefully set the box of mason jars at the back of the cave where water and rain wouldn’t reach them. He made a quick bed from the jeans, sweaters, shirts and socks. On top of it he unfurled the tarp. He placed his gun and the bullets on the opposite side of the cave . The rest he threw haphazardly in a corner.

He took a moment to check his hands. They were weaker, but the trembling had yet to set in. The Soldier pulled out the rest of the pill and bit it into a fourth. He licked the crumbs and dust from the cracks of his hand. Six hours.

The Soldier pulled out the water bottles and lined them up next to the makeshift bed. He walked through the wood and gathered as many stray pieces of timber as he could carry in one haul.

The summer sun had yet to breach the chill of mountain air, and there were still pockets of snow on the ground. The river was crusted with ice on the upper banks. Most of the wood was rotten and fragile but it would work in the short run. The Soldier dug out the nails and pushed them through the wood until each branch was lined with metal spikes.

Five hours, fifteen minutes.

He placed the traps through the natural growth of the trees. It wouldn’t stop someone, but hopefully they’d make enough sound to let him get away. It would puncture any tires, at least.

Hours five, four, and three were spent scouting out edible plants. He found an elderberry bush by its white flowers and marked the spot for later.

The river was too wild for cattails but he found a patch of wild onions beginning to sprout near the clearing. Dandelions were beginning to sprout in the grass and though their bright orange heads had yet to peek out of the thick groundcover he was able to spot the distinctive spiky leaves. The Soldier pulled as many as he could find, roots and all. He culled the wild onions, leaving a few to seed and ate them raw.

He gathered pine needles and chewed on them while he foraged, the bitter taste soothing away the bite of the meds.

At this point he hadn’t eaten in over four days.

In the end he risked the icy chill of the river and gathered the green moss, lichen and weeds that grew on the edges, knowing every the little bit he ate would help him survive stage three.

Eventually, the shakes in his hands and legs forced him turn back to the cave. By the time he reached the opening, he was down to hour one.

 _*_

Stage three of the plan wasn’t so much a part of the plan as an inevitability.

Detoxification started with the shakes and spread into pins and needles shooting up from the base of his spine. The Soldier shivered and curled into a little ball in his nest of shirts. His skin prickled and hairs rose on the back of his neck as the sensation swelled and grew like a wave rising over the deep. His lungs seized within the cage of his ribs and his breath echoed in the cave as he sucked in ragged and uneven gasps.

It never got easier.

The Soldier stretched out to relieve the pressure against his lungs. The pins and needles crested and broke like static electricity across his bones. His muscles seized and shook but the Soldier twisted his hands into his hair held on until the seizure passed. He had a few moments to breathe before the tingles returned. When his fingers opened, he noticed a clump of brown strands caught in the joints of his left hand. The Soldier groaned and rolled onto his side.

He was exhausted.

The shakes moved up into his brain until it rattled against his skull like a marble in a glass jar. It felt like something was driving a steel spike through his temple inch at a time. The pin and needles built and crested, crashing through his body like a wave on the rocks. His body shook and jolted, muscles cramping and shaking with spasms until they pulled his body taught. Even after the tingling passed his muscles quivered from exhaustion.

The Soldier pulled deep breaths, slow and steady as he waited for the next wave to start. He coughed. His chest hurt. He coughed again and looked down at the red smear across his palm. Fluid was already beginning to gather in his lungs.

It was happening faster than last time.

The Soldier closed his eyes as its nose began to tingle and a lump, imaginary, grew in its throat. It’s eyes prickled in an involuntary emotional response. His breath wheezed against muscles that locked down tight.

He knew he was supposed to swallow back the lump and force back the tears, but his body hurt and his stomach ached. Every few moments his body shivered and wracked his bones. The Soldier let the tears build and fall and pool into the crevice of his nose until it spilled over to his cheek and finally to the floor.

Once the flood doors opened it poured over him. The Soldier buried his face into his soft blue hoodie and wept. The water against his oversensitive, overheated skin scrapped like sandpaper but the emotional cave yawning into his chest surged hungrily. Wrung out by the last few days the Winter Soldier lapsed into troubled unconsciousness.

When he woke he couldn’t open his eyes because they were so sensitive. His fever began to climb. In two hours it would reach dangerous levels but without a spotter the Soldier couldn’t risk looking for a cool stream. He might slip and be unable to drag himself out, and drown in water less than two feet deep.

His hand clenched against the shadow sensation of fine hair beneath his hand, of skinny bones and a cotton shirt. “What are you doing Soldier?” The Soldier flinched but didn’t look around. Stage three: his fever reached sufficient height to provoke auditory and sensory illusions. “Get up and report!”

The voice changed, echoing as if from far away. “The rotators have settled nicely into the clavicle and scapula. We have to insert a brace into the thorax, and replace the floating ribs.” The voice was matter-of-fact, a little detached. The Soldier flinched away from fingers on its shoulder and suddenly he could _see_.

Cave walls melted into a brightly lit lab. Sterile counters held a few dozen trays filled with scalpels, drill bits of various sizes, and clamps. The doctor looking down at him from behind a sterile white mask. “Subject is awake and responding to stimulus, but that shouldn’t damage the shoulder. Body is accepting the replacement metal better than the aluminum and steel compound. Recommend covering the bones and…”

“Soldier! Look at me!” The Soldier jerked as General Lukin grabbed his chin and jerked it up. “Why did you fail your mission, Soldier! Answer me.”

The Soldier swiped through him until he faded into the darkness of the cave. “Not real,” the Soldier muttered hands still swiping through the air. “It’s not real, not real, not real.” He sucked in a deep breath and coughed out blood. One hand threaded into his long hair and yanked at the strands. “Not real.”

“Bucky,” whispered a low tenor into his ear. “How long have I been out? Is ma okay?” The Soldier clamped his hands over his ears but the voice was inside his head. It continued uninterrupted. “Why do you look like that? What happened? Where’s ma?” The voice rose in pitch and fervor. “Bucky? Bucky! Bucky, no. No! She can’t die not when I’m not in the room. You were supposed to wake me. You were supposed to wake me, you bast—“

“She’s gone, Stevie,” the Soldier whispered, his hands curling next to his cheek. He felt worn cotton under his fingers. A bony shoulder against his chest and a rattling ribcage in the circle of his arms. “She’s gone.”

After that the voices left him alone for a while. His head was still foggy from the fever but he crawled over to his emergency supplies and broke the seal on a bottle of water. His throat hurt when he swallowed but he knew this was just the beginning. Stage four was coming soon and he needed all the fluids he could get.

He never made it past stage four on his own before. Hydra always managed to find him before then and bring him back when the shakes made him too weak to fight them. The Soldier clamped his teeth around his right forefinger and bit while he still could. The pain focused him until he could reach into his bag and pull out the bright gummy bears.

He opened the package of gummy bears and lined them up in front of him by color. It was a small package. Seven green bears, six reds, four blue, one purple, and one yellow. He pointed at the yellow bear.

“You’re the captain. Captain Bear. And these,” he lined up the seven green bears in front of the yellow bear. “Are your men. Your mission is to stand guard over the…” His head hurt. “Over me.” He picked up the purple bear and set it in the middle of the green. “You guard me, okay? The blue are civilians. They’re really important, okay? You always protect civilians.” He lined up the reds and swished one of them. “Red. Red’s the bad guy, okay? Don’t let them get me.” His finger traced the captain. “Can I trust you, Captain?” he cocked his head as if listening. “You’ll protect me with your life? Sir, yes sir.”

The pain hit.

It started in his spine and spread like lava or fire. It ached and then tore, throbbed like a bruise and spiked like a muscle cramp. The Soldier rolled away from his bed and threw up. His bowls didn’t have enough in them to eject. His flesh ached and shivered and he felt skin tear next to the coupling of his left arm. His skin was thin from dehydration and a breakdown in cellular function and the muscle spasms were strong enough to create lesions in areas of tension.

In a few hours his hair would start to fall out. Then his teeth would come loose. His gums were already bleeding, so he had to be careful not to rip into his cheek or lips and tear them out. Eventually the serum would regrow the roots but for now his jaw ached.

“Bucky! Mom said you had to help me in the kitchen but I’ve been working for hours and you haven’t lifted a finger. Bucky! If you don’t get in here right. Now. I’m telling mom!”

“Shut up, Becca,” the Soldier groused, forehead pressed into the dirt. “Can’t ya see I’m busy here?”

“I don’t care! You need to help me with the dishes. Mom said!” Then, high voice hesitant. “Hey, Buck, you don’t look so good. Are you… crying? Buck. You know ma and pa are gonna be okay, right, Bucky? We’ll figure it out.”

“Yeah squirt. We’re gonna be just fine.” Another shiver, another split in the skin under his armpit and across his ribs. “Dad will get work come summer and it’ll all be better. You’ll see.”

And then, low. Anguished. “Please don’t make me do this.” It was the same low tenor from before. Again, fainter. “People are gonna die, Buck. I can’t let that happen. Please don’t make me do this.”

Bucky fell asleep wracked by seizures and coughs, his nose and mouth caked in dirt and blood, the clothes soiled by sweat, blood and tears. He woke slowly. He had no way of knowing how many days it’d been.

His head didn’t hurt and his skin didn’t feel like stretched canvas. The Soldier scrubbed away the tried blood under his mouth and nose and carefully inspected the damage. His wounds were already healing, the skin around the left arm a little slower than the matches of tears under his arms and on his back and legs.

He kicked fresh dirt over the piss, vomit, blood on the ground before ducking outside to figure out how many days had passed. There was rain water on the ground but it was already beginning to dry so it happened at least a day ago. He found some wolf tracks outside his cave – three days old.

The grass outside his base was beginning to straighten from being trampled. A week. He’d been lost in the fever and aches at least a week.

It felt like more.

It felt like less.

 _*_

He slept for a few more hours. When he woke the world felt shaky but color bled into the objects. Where before he had recognized his sweatshirt as blue in a factual sense, his brain now catalogued a range of data from like to dislike, contrast, and shadow and depth.

His stomach growled and gurgled.

Muscles strained and ached as he forced himself onto his feet. His legs still shook in the aftershocks, but most of his weakness was hunger and dehydration. He’d maintained enough lucidity to drain half his water bottles during detoxification. He drank one more to fill his hollow stomach. The water sloshed and caused his stomach to cramp, but after a few minutes he was able to straighten.

The first order of business was food.

The Soldier retraced his steps to the dandelion field. Now able to harvest and gather what he wished, he chewed on the bitter leaves and the few yellow heads that had popped up. The roots he put in a backpack for later along with a bounty of pine needles.

After a long and careful search, he identified and marked out some blackberry and mulberry bushes, as yet unripe. A mile from the cave, he struck gold. There was a field of clover just coming up from the winter thaw, and around the edges was a patch of chickweed.

He used the strength from the food to tie a net from one of the spools of thread, which he placed in the water near the waterfall. He tied his knife onto a large, sturdy branch and created a makeshift spear.

After he’d eaten his fill, the Soldier turned to securing base camp.

The Soldier pulled out the glass mason jars he’d prepared before. In all but five he placed the fire starters from the rockets and pulled the wires up through the top. He twisted on the lid, carefully counting the turns until it was tight. Then he unscrewed it, poked two small holes into the top and threaded the wire through. He packed the rest of the tube with gunpowder from the firecrackers.

He’d twisted the wires before threading it into the lid so they were straight when it was screwed on all the way. He carefully cut pieces of card paper and slid it between the ends of the of the wire.

The rest of the glass jars he filled with a long fuse and gunpowder, keeping one fuse in reserve.

Once he was satisfied, the Soldier took the bombs, two at a time, and set them up throughout the woods. He stayed away from animal trails and major feeding grounds to keep them from going off accidentally.

The five bombs left over were set nearby where he could light the fuses and run.

Lastly, the Soldier took the bells and hammered them into the walls of the cave in a straight line from the mouth to the back. He tied one end of his spool of thread to a bell and set off into the wild. He bent the nails into a U-shape and hammered it over the string, leaving enough room for the thread to move easily. The Soldier carefully threaded the woods, each bell monitoring one section of the woods.

He did this with all twenty-five bells.

When he was done he picked his way back to base camp and stood observing it with a keen eye. . The Soldier looked around, a mental checklist already forming in his brain. He needed to set up a collector for fresh water, create a tanning rack for animal hides, check his nets and scout the land. Later today he’d go hunting and use the pelt for bowstring, or maybe a new bed.

It felt like a lot.

It felt like too little.

It felt human.

In the asset's brain, a little seed began to unfurl.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please do not follow Bucky's example in anything. Everything he's doing is very dangerous and SHOULD NOT BE ATTEMPTED WITHOUT PROPER TRAINING. The details are included because they can be readily found on the internet, but DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. I kept some details in reserve because of safety reasons, so please do not try and create homemade bombs.
> 
> Some notes for those interested in Wilderness Survival:
> 
> [Dandelions](http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/dandelion.aspx) are some of your best friends in the wild. They can keep you alive on their lonesome and help clear your body of toxins. They have Vitamin A, C, and more iron than spinach. [Pine Needles](http://tacticalintelligence.net/blog/how-to-eat-a-pine-tree.htm) are a great source of vitamin C. It's actually unlikely that Bucky could survive only on this, but he's been without food for eleven days after the fever. It takes three weeks (21 days) to starve to death, and he's used to physical weakness). 
> 
> [Chickweed](http://www.altnature.com/gallery/chickweed.htm) is fantastic for surviving in the wild. It grows abundantly across the USA and Europe, and is great for food and medicinal purposes, which Bucky needs after the last week.
> 
> Here are some details about [Caves](http://wildwoodsurvival.com/survival/shelter/cave/index.html) to help you picture the cave Bucky found.
> 
> No Steve in this chapter, but he'll show up soon.
> 
> I'd love to know what you think. Constructive criticism, questions, and comments welcome!


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Greg never treated the other people like he treated the Soldier. Greg fought hard for the women on his staff and rebuked any office bullying. Greg argued for the little people, and ranted about social injustice. But Greg never fought for the Soldier, or rebuked the Strike Teams for being cruel. Greg was the forerunner of the campaign to call the Winter Soldier ‘it’ even though the Soldier felt more like a “he.”
> 
> A sensation like burning acid and stuffed pressure swept over him. Rage.
> 
> Of course, this only mattered if James Barnes was a person. If he was a person then Greg had wronged him. If he was not a person then Greg was within his rights to protect the Soldier’s mission parameters by stripping it of a false identity.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, this is a darker chapter. Warnings for self-harm, suicidal thoughts, nightmares, contemplation and description of dehumanization, slut shamming by an unaware narrator, violence, and victim blaming by the victim. If there is something else I need to warn for, please let me know.
> 
> Special thanks to void_star for helping me with typos.

 

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

_C.G. Jung_

 

_*_

 

The Soldier rinsed the soiled tarp in the river and cut it into several squares of different sizes, one as long as he was tall and five smaller ones. He dug four holes about two feet deep and lined them with mulch. He cut the tops off the left over water bottles and stuck them on the bottom, laying strips of rubber piping so one end rested in the bottle and the other stuck out five inches from the soil.

The Soldier loosely covered the hole with the tarp, packed the edges with dirt. The larger piece of tarp he hung from a tree layered sand, rocks and charcoal to make a water filter.

While digging the holes the Soldier turned the fevered memories over in his head. The fever had stolen everything but the most vivid recollections. The feel of cool hands on his jaw. A woman’s perfume. He remembered hearing voices but he couldn’t recall the depth of the octave or the meaning of the words.

However, even though the words were gone, the Soldier remembered feeling… human. Like there had once been people, _real people,_ who saw the Soldier as one of them. Maybe, once, he'd even had a family. Sentiment, strange and impalpable sank into his bones.

He had a lot of time to think about it.

He thought about it while laying a trap line, carefully balancing stones and rocks to snap the necks of smaller prey. He thought about it while waiting for the summer rain to pass. He thought about it while stalking a deer into a meadow, handmade bow and arrow held loosely between his fingers. He thought about it while skinning and drying another pelt for his growing bed of skins or when the leaves budded and he gathered edible plants to string up across the cave wall to dry.

The man said he knew him.

The man said he had a name.

The man called him Bucky.

If he had a name… did that mean he was a person? Did that mean he had a mom, a dad. A sister. He thought he’d like to have a sister. She’d be younger than him with big brown eyes and a crooked, gap toothed smile.

Bucky. The Soldier rolled the sounds and syllables over his tongue. Buck-kee. Buh-kee. “My name is James Buchannan Barnes,” he said one day while gathering fallen acorns, just to try it out. It didn’t sink into his chest or settle on his shoulders the way a name should.

The Soldier pondered that while he worked.

Later, while turning rabbit hide into strips of leather for traps he tried it again. “Bucky,” he said under his breath as he drew a rough stone across the stretched out skin to scrape off sinew and muscle. “I’m your friend.” He salted the skin rubbed it in to the pelt. “You’re name is James Buchanan Barnes.”

As the days past, his consideration of personhood turned less theoretical. He considered what it meant to be a person. The only persons he’d interacted with had been soldiers and technicians.

If he thought about them at all, he supposed his targets were people but they felt divorced from him like a cup or a broken chair, or more accurately, a dusty mannequin. The only facts he truly knew about them was how they died.

Crying. Screaming. Bargaining.

Some stood silent and still while others prayed for God to save them.

They didn’t feel like people but snapshots of a photo in his mission report. Surreal, something meant to replicate life but not encompass it.

So, the Soldier – or should he call himself Bucky, just to try it out? – contemplated the technicians. There were, he remembered, kind technicians, gruff technicians, cruel technicians, and some gruff kind technicians and kind but cruel technicians. Some were abrupt – they grabbed his arm or shoulder and shoved him into location. Some touched him timidly, which in turn made the Soldier – maybe he was a James. He didn’t feel like a James – feel uncertain and anxious.

There were some he liked.

Technician Greg had been part of the defrosting and rehabilitation crew since the early sixties. He began as a stocky short college intern with dark black curls and uncertain hands and slowly devolved into a stocky man in his fifties with gunmetal grey hair and a sure firm grip.

Greg was the one who pulled newbies aside when they exhibited emotional distress and reminded them of their missions. He put an arm around their shoulder (or if he couldn’t reach being only five feet two inches tall, around their waist) and reminded them of their mission to prepare the Soldier for his assignments. Their duty was essential for the health and proficiency of the weapon, that emotional compromises and infractions harmed the Soldier more than they helped.

“Keep your eyes on the greater good,” Greg always said, solemn and sincere. “We are doing first-rate work here, saving the world.” Then he took them by the shoulder and pointed out the lines of data pulled from the Soldier’s arm. “Look at this,” he’d say. “Isn’t it fascinating?”

Crises of conscience, the Soldier remembered Greg telling a crying new technician after he witnessed his first wipe, helped no one. All it did was cripple the efficiency of the team.

Greg never stood for the games the Strike Teams tried to play with the Soldier. He always interrupted and shooed them away before they could damage and compromise its mission integrity. Greg cleaned it off, bandaged wounded limbs, and set broken bones with a firm and impersonal touch.

However, the longer the Soldier thought about Greg the less he liked him. _If_ the Soldier was a person, _if_ the Soldier was _James Buchannan Barnes_ , then Greg had actively discouraged other Technicians and Staff from treating him like a person.

In fact, the more the Soldier thought about how Greg taught generations of technicians to never touch the Soldier except to move him, clean him, or repair him; how he told them the Soldier _preferred_ being treated like a tool, the more his bone hand shook.

Greg never treated the other people like he treated the Soldier. Greg fought hard for the women on his staff and rebuked any office bullying. Greg argued for the little people, and ranted about social injustice. But Greg never fought for the Soldier, or rebuked the Strike Teams for being cruel. Greg was the forerunner of the campaign to call the Winter Soldier ‘it’ even though the Soldier felt more like a “ _he.”_

A sensation like burning acid and stuffed pressure swept over him. Rage.

Of course, this only mattered if James Barnes was a person.

If he was a person then Greg had wronged him.

If he was not a person then Greg was within his rights to protect the Soldier’s mission parameters by stripping it of a false identity.

Before the Soldier could make any conclusions about Greg and the rest of the technicians he had to make conclusions about himself. The Soldier decided to table the name issue until he reached a reasonable conclusion.

Persons, the Soldier decided, made choices.

They made choices on what to eat, what to wear, who they liked or didn’t like. Technician Greg did not like Lt. Ross Rodriguez. Lt. Ross Rodriguez always wore a rainbow ribbon somewhere on his person despite Hydra regulations. Technician Anne Barton chose a tuna salad over a chicken sandwich every Tuesday lunch.

The Soldier chose to take the gummy bears. The Soldier chose to leave Hydra. Therefore, the Soldier made a choice. Therefore, the Soldier was a person.

Well, thought the Soldier, pleased. That was easy.

He continued to delight in his conclusions until the next day when he saw a squirrel choose between chasing one of its friends and taking a nap. If animals could make choices too then the ability to choose was not inherently part of being a person. The soldier frowned and returned to the mission board.

People made choices and animals made choices, but persons were clearly not animals so what made their choices different than animals? Was it as simple as being human? But clearly not, or else Greg would never have told the new technicians what he said. Maybe personhood was something you earned. Maybe it was a privilege the Soldier lost.

Maybe he had been a person once but didn’t deserve to be one anymore.

This thought sank into the Soldier’s mind like a parasite. He didn’t bother lighting a fire that night and when he tried to eat some dried jerky he couldn’t keep it down. His fingers shook. He his stomach was tight and ueasy.

That was it.

This must be why the Soldier could track a snow rabbit at 160 yards without a scope but didn’t know where he came from. People knew where they came from. Even Sergeant Everett Snodgrass knew even though he was an orphan and foster care child. Though he’d never known his parents – a fact he brought up constantly during squad poker night – Snodgrass often spoke about growing up in a little town in Nebraska and moving to Detroit at seventeen.

The Soldier must have been a person. The Soldier must have been James Buchannan Barnes and known the man who stopped fighting but he wasn’t any more. For some reason he lost the ability or maybe the right to be a person. Maybe that’s why Greg called him an it and refused to let him eat with the others. Maybe its because Greg knew the Soldier didn’t deserve to be anything but a weapon.

He must have done something truly horrible to lose the right of being called a person. The Soldier thought about the missions he fulfilled and wondered if they were the reason or the punishment.

The thought was so horrible the Soldier keened and curled in on himself for a long time. Resentfully, he bet animals didn’t feel this distressed about whether or not they were persons or animals.

He paused.

The Soldier sat back on his haunches and considered this. And when he was done, he considered it some more. Maybe he was making this too complicated. Maybe being a person was as simple of _thinking_ of yourself as a person. Maybe all he had to do was act like a person and eventually… maybe… those attributes would sink into his skin like the metal of his arm sank into his bones. His thoughts returned to the technicians. He decided to wait to be mad at Greg or using the name James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes until he earned his personhood back.

So, what attributes were those?

He began with Barton and Rodriguez. He recalled how Rodriguez always kept his hair cropped short in accordance with regulation and always took the time to straighten and iron his uniform. Occasionally he shaved delicate designs into his hair.

Barton did not spend time inspecting her hair or touching up her makeup like Private Michaela Carson but she was always clean and smelled nice. She kept a bottle of scented oil on her desk.

Real humans, the Soldier concluded, knew how to self maintenance.

Self-maintenance required a person to be clean and healthy with hair, nails and skin maintained at a socially acceptable level of care. Too much care provoked scorn and distain or invited lewd attention. Such was the case of Private Carson. Too little created social barriers and isolation like Technician Mike Calloway who smelled like old sweat, hair oil, and a lack of dental hygiene. The Soldier picked at the edge of a tooth and scraped away a nail-full of yellow gunk.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in charge of his own personal hygiene. He knew the tools used: metal spikes to scrape around his gums and a brush like a drill; but Soldier hadn’t bothered to get the tools required for hygiene.

He found a good oak tree and cut off a small twig. He frayed the end and used it to wipe off the buildup of scum and yellow on his teeth. He didn’t have soap but he boiled the animal fat from his kills with ashes of his campfire to make lye.

The second part of proper self-maintenance was clothing. He bundled up the soiled, foul stack of clothes and headed to the river, where he spent half a day wringing them clean of months old dried vomit and several weeks worth of sweat. As he slapped shirts and pants against a boulder he felt an odd wave sweep over him, as if he were in two places at once.

The staccato movement of scrubbing cloth, dunking and redunking a shirt until the water ran clear reminded him of something… He’d done this before, though as hard as he tried he couldn’t recall a mission requiring him to wash clothes.

The Soldier strung a line across two budding birch trees and began to thread it with clothes. The certainty washed over him. He suddenly _knew_ that if he looked to the left he’d see a tall, hawk nosed woman with an apron around her waist pinning a long white sheet to the line. His head turned but all he saw was the empty meadow, grass bending in the wind.

At the end of the week the Soldier sat back and looked at all he had accomplished: he had soap and a toothbrush, and clean clothes drying in the sun. He felt very person like. He took a moment to try and identify the warm fluttering in his chest. He’d never felt it outside of a mission before so it took him a moment to identify it as pride. He was _proud_ of what he had accomplished.

It was the first time he felt proud of something that didn’t end in bloodshed. He liked it. It was lighter than the usual aching stomach and burning eyes.

“How about that.” the Soldier looked around the campsite and let himself enjoy the feeling of guilt-free accomplishment. “How about that.”

He rubbed his chin and cheek and contemplated the bristle on his face.

Generally, the Hygiene and Physical Maintenance Technicians left his beard alone. It was risky to approach the Winter Soldier with a razor before a wipe him. When he was high on adrenaline, all sharp items were a threat. After wiping the Soldier was pliant and confused and, he was beginning to understand, far too guilt-inducing. Or maybe the Hygiene and Physical Maintenance Technicians were just lazy. The Soldier thought about the time Snodgrass ordered a four-man team to search the room for some files because he didn’t want to get out of his recliner. That was, he conceded, probably the best explanation.

He knew soldiers were supposed to maintain a neatly trimmed jaw line and short hair. He didn’t have trimming scissors, and knives didn’t have the delicate precision necessary to shape and maintain a beard. The Soldier grabbed a chunk of hair and sawed through it. His blade caught and pulled. Sharp pain arched through his scalp. The Soldier kept sawing, his hair falling in uneven chunks.

He ran his hand across the uneven mat of oily, sweat sticky hair left behind. The new cut ripped out the still fragile roots, leaving chunks. The Soldier cringed from the broken reflection in the water. He grabbed the new bar of soap and viciously rubbed it across his scalp, scrapping the nails of his right hand through flakes of dandruff and caked dirt.

Eventually, the Soldier growled in frustration and threw the soap away. In terms of hair maintenance, he resigned himself to being more like Calloway than Rodriguez. The Soldier pulled what remained of his hair into a knot and left it.

That night the Soldier rolled the syllables of The Name over his tongue again, just to chew on them a bit. “James. James Buchanan Barnes. James Barnes.” Then, in a whisper as he hunched over a rabbit leg, “Bucky.” He glanced around, and when the world didn’t fall apart he said it again, a little louder. “Bucky Barnes.”

He contemplated the vowels and consonants. It was an odd name. Certainly not one he had heard before. He thought he was growing to like it.

_*_

The Blue Bear army was in all out war against the Reds.

Captain Yellow Bear lead his men on a raid against the Red Bear camp. A few days ago, the Red Bears had kidnapped Asset Bear and were holding him captive. They had several bouncing big rock traps around the perimeter but Captain Bear and his men weren’t afraid of the danger. Captain Bear spoke to Agent Blue Bear and told her he was going in with or without her pebble support.

Agent Blue Bear and Munitions Commander Blue Bear agreed that it was vital to the safety and security of the cave that they save Asset Bear. The Soldier – the real soldier – always faltered a bit when he tried to come up with a reason, but Captain Bear didn’t seem to need one.

Captain Bear led the charge against the Red Bear fortress. The Red Bears fought them off ferociously, determined to keep Bear Soldier behind the rubber ball walls. Captain Bear was being pushed back. His men were failing. Agent Blue Bear said they had to fall back.

“No!” said Captain Yellow Bear. “I won’t leave Bucky!”

The Soldier stopped, two bears still pinched between his fingers and suspended over the rubber bouncy ball fort. He cleared his throat and started again.

“I reject that order,” said Captain Yellow Bear. “The Asset Bear is too valuable to the efforts of the Blue Bear corps! I refuse to waste such a valued resource.”

“But,” said Agent Blue Bear. “If he’s so capable and valuable why didn’t he rescue himself? It’s not that hard.”

The Soldier stopped again and glared at Agent Blue Bear. She wasn’t supposed to say that. She was supposed to say – “We don’t need a Soldier too weak to rescue himself. That’s why we didn’t’ save him before.”

She wasn’t supposed to say that either.

The Soldier scowled and swept all the Gummy Bears back into the small pouch he’d made for them. All Soldiers had to be returned to storage until they learned to cooperate. It was better for the Gummy Bears to learn that now.

A few minutes later he peeked into the pouch to see if they were feeling more cooperative.

Persons, the Soldier argued to his rational side when it told him he behaving in a manner unbecoming to a deadly weapon, knew how to play. Greg and Saunders and Rodriguez and Carson played regular poker games. Barton had her WoW and MMoRG games running in the background between ops. Even Agent Rumlow and his men liked to play games.

He dumped the Gummy Bear army out again. He set the stage and picked up Agent Blue Bear (her left ear was missing) and Captain Yellow Bear. The Soldier cleared his throat and started again.

“I never leave a man behind,” said Captain Yellow Bear. “And even if I did I wouldn’t leave Asset Bear.” The Soldier stuttered over the name but continued. “Either you’re with me or you’re against me.”

Agent Cart— _no, no no –_ Agent Blue Bear looked at Captain Bear and said, “One Soldier isn’t worth the whole mission.”

“He is to me,” said Captain Bear.

The Soldier’s voice broke.

He gently returned the other bears to the pouch but rested the yellow candy in the center of his palm. He cupped his fingers over the tiny yellow Captain and repeated, “He is to me.”

_*_

The Soldier dreamed he stood in a field of tall grass stretching out as far as his eye could see. The sky was blue with roiling purple clouds. He didn’t know how he got there but he knew it was too empty. Too overgrown. He couldn’t see his feet before him or the path behind him.

It was so empty.

He woke shuddering and silent and stirred restlessly until he dropped back to sleep.

He was back in the field, but this time there was a tiny house in the distance so small he could cover it with his thumb. He took a step forward and heard the crunch of bone. The Soldier looked down through the grass and saw blood welling up from the roots. A child’s face lay beneath his boots. He recognized her. She was crying. His boot was crushing her jaw and forehead.

She was crying.

The Soldier started to run but every footstep crunched on the bones and flesh of his victims. Their cries rose up and the grass turned into hands that grabbed onto his clothes and hair and tried to pull him down.

The ground split and cracked and lava poured out from the depths. He heard a horrendous howling and looked to see the demons of hell clawing their way too him. He turned and ran but the ground splintered upon each step until he was trapped on a small crumbling island melting away in the molten rock.

He teetered. His arms swung wildly trying to catch his balance. As he fell the demons turned and pursued him, screeching and clawing at each other until there were pieces of bodies flying every which way. A head passed him close enough to see; the demon shared his face.

The Soldier woke with a cry.

His face was wet with tears and his sweat-soaked clothes clung to his body. He ran his hands over his limbs in search of cuts or bruises left by the sentient grass or the red demons.

Satisfied that everything was intact he flopped back onto his ever thickening bed of animal pelts and curled into a little ball. The blackness of the cave stretched out before him and he shivered despite the September warmth.

“Who was she?” he asked the darkness. “I knew her.”

If the darkness knew it wasn’t answering.

 

The nightmares returned the next night, and the night after that. The Soldier bit his knuckles bloody trying to stay awake. He began to dread lying down to sleep, preferring to push it off for as long as he could before it compromised mission readiness.

In some dreams he drowned, blood pouring up from the corpse under his hands to suffocate him. In others the man who refused to fight killed him, hands slamming into his face over and over. Some were still and silent, an empty plain as terrifying as death.

The Soldier opened his dream eyes to the empty field. Instead of a house a woman stood in a blue flower dress facing away from him. The dream was totally silent like someone had stuffed the air with cotton. The field flowed under the Soldier until he stood behind the woman, one arm stretched out to grab her shoulder. The redheaded girl screamed as he turned her around.

He woke up before he could see her face.

The girl with red hair and broken face is the only constant in the nightmares **.**

After a night of horrors so vivid the Soldier couldn’t get up the next day the Soldier resolved to delve deep. He sat on his bed of furs and pushed at the forced boundaries in his mind planted by first by Department X and reinforced by Hydra, the solid walls of consciousness and training keeping him from inconsequential knowledge. The boundary flexed and strained under the force of his will but held.

The Soldier frowned and folded his legs. He rested his hands palm up on his knees and let his eyes slide closed. He filled his lungs slowly and breathed out. Again. Again. Again.

When he was ready he plunged into the blackness inside. He forced himself to think about the mental pain of wiping and programming, ruthlessly pressing triggers and switches to remember standing for hours naked in the cold, kneeling on nails.

He threw himself at the walls of programming and felt the pop as clearly as if his bow string snapped beside his ear.

Pain. Sharp, echoing pain. It split through his head like a whirlwind, like the ground that crumpled in his dream. He gagged and swallowed his vomit as the thoughts began to flood. It was nothing – a mission in Amsterdam. Routine. One target. One kill.

The little girl wasn’t in the memory.

The Soldier pictured her in his mind and focused on the details. Red head. Green, hazel eyes. A small pointed chin. He held the memory and shoved it in his mind like a knife to cut through the nets holding his memory back.

For a moment it worked.

Then, like a vicious dog pushed too far, the wires snapped back. Memories flooded him. Memories of blood, of a little girl crushed under the wheel of a car, the memory of a man stretching out toward her to save her even as the Winter Soldier lined the barrel up with his skull. There was a pregnant woman crying.

But the worst part. The very worst. The worst part was the _sentiment._

His kills were always different. Some people begged. Some accepted it with quiet dignity. He knew this. But until this moment he never _knew_ it.

The mannequin faces of his victims fleshed out and filled with emotion. Fear, anguish, grief, hatred, despair, regret, hope turned to ash. She wanted more time.

“No,” the Soldier groaned. “No, I don’t want it. I don’t want it!” He clutched the sides of his head, fingers sliding across the uneven of hair for purchase, twisting the brown strands around his fingers and yanking, screaming as kill after kill pounded into his brain.

The grey haired woman with wine spilled down her nightgown, the brilliant teenager too smart for his own good, and the father pushing his daughter on the swing – the daughter’s face when her father collapsed silently.

Suddenly he could see their faces and identify with utter, horrible clarity what they felt when he killed them.

And suddenly he realized…all he had to do was give in. Let the net snap back and take it all away. In fact, all he had to do was go back to Hydra. Even if the net snapped back he’d still remember what he felt. He would remember _understanding_.

It would be better to wipe it all away.

A clean slate.

A clean start.

Just give in. It’s okay. It’s not your fault. The pain is just a warning, it doesn’t have to stay. Relax. Let it—

“NO!” James Barnes roared. “No, you son of a bitch.” He threw himself back into his mind and scratched the walls when Hydra’s nets tried to drag him out. He screamed and clawed until the nets were in shreds. It hurt. Like tearing off a scab and finding a bone sticking out, but the voice was gone. The Soldier curled over his knees and keened. For the first time he reached for a memory and felt it slide into his grip without effort or pain.

It was his. He didn’t want it and it hurt _so bad_ but it was his and that made it everything.

He thought he had felt satisfaction. He thought he knew pride, and joy, and gratitude, and kindness, and love, and grace, and jealousy, and anger, and loneliness.

He’d known nothing.

The only emotion he’d truly known was fear.

Now all the emotions bled into his here and now. He looked around his cave and felt true accomplishment for escaping Hydra for so long. He touched the fur under his body and felt pleasure. He tasted the saltless, tasteless jerky stacked beside his bed and wrinkled his nose in distaste. He thought about Greg, and Barton, and Rodriguez and felt betrayal, anger, and longing.

He thought about the girl with red hair. Regret, though the memory of her was long gone.

He thought about the faces of his victims and the guilt crushed him.

The Soldier lay on his bed of pelts and let the emotion roll over him, one finger clamped between his teeth. One by one he pulled up his remembered kills and examined them with a mind sharpened by training and science. The sun rose and set. There were pelts to be dried and clothes to wash. He should shave. Shaving was very person-like.

The Soldier didn’t move. He felt like his legs and arms were pinned by the weight of his sins. They ran over and over through his brain in an endless loop. Free to finally plan for itself, his mind ran a thousand scenarios of how he could have saved each one. Then it began to play games.

The second sunrise was high in the sky when his brain decided to superimpose the face of a little girl with blue-brown eyes and brown hair over the face of his other child victims. The Soldier twitched, helpless against a brain that forced him to watch his hands kill a girl he vaguely remembered helping with the dishes and tucking into bed. He killed her over and over again.

The Soldier tried to reach for memories before he was the asset but his brain twisted them all into horrors. Barnes swallowed the lump of _unfair_. It was wrong for his brain to twist the few memories he saved into weapons. Unfair.

This was something person-like, the Soldier realized. Maybe it was punishment for everything he'd done. Regret meant understanding his actions had consequences anchored in the realization that other people were real. If this was part of being a person, the Soldier figured he’d earned at least one of his names. It was a bitter insight following on the heels of another deeper longing.

He wanted to die.

He wanted to lay here until he wasted away from dehydration. He pictured his heart stopping. His lungs stilling and breath exhaling one last time. Barnes closed his eyes.

The second sun sank.

Barnes didn’t open his eyes to watch the shadows extend. The movie playing across his eyelids felt more real that the damp chill of cave or the body warm metal hand curled against his cheek. He watched himself line up a shot. He felt his past self breath deep.

The first and second bell rang.

Blue eyes snapped open.

Barnes rolled over and scrambled on hands and knees to the line of bells nailed into the wall. He sat fixated on the line of tension in the string as the cord pulled taut. _Ding._ _Ding._ Then the bell next to it: _ding._

The Soldier stood smoothly and made his way into the woods. A lesser man would have trouble navigating the thick brambles of a forest at night. The Soldier was not a lesser man.

Barnes moved quickly to the places he’d hidden the glass bombs. He unfurled the threads and carefully strung them across the animal trails and areas of thinner undergrowth. Barnes pulled out the logs stuck with nails stuck through and laid them outside the blast radius.

He returned to the cave and took the five jars held in reserve. He listened to the bells. When the fifth bell rang he threw two logs onto the fire and blew the embers into a cheerful blaze. The campfire below lit the stones with amber. The soldier kept his eyes fixed on the shadows to keep his night vision keen. Barnes stuffed a jacket with spare clothes and propped it up against the cave wall.

Finally, he put the pouch with Captain Yellow Bear and his Gummy Army (Reds included) into his inside pocket before leaving the cave and the furs and the rows of herbs without looking back.

The perfect snipers nest was about a click north and four hundred feet up. The ridge of the mountain sheltered a short outcropping and a crop of trees from the sun and moonlight and overlooked the campsite below.

Barnes set up his rifle months ago and left it covered by the longest strip of tarp. He lay down on the rocks and pressed his cheek to the end. By the time he reached the perch the moon hung overhead. The fire below was beginning to die. And there was movement in the trees.

Barnes breathed deep and let it out slow.

The first detonation tore through the troops like a shotgun blast through plastic. Barnes heard the screams of men and saw some of them begin to retreat. He kept himself relaxed, focused on the small white flags tied to the tops of the trees at equidistance.

Breathed deep. Let it out slow. Pulled the trigger.

A man in black tactical gear dropped. Barnes readjusted and the trooper next to him crumpled with half a head. Barnes shot through a third man to hit the fourth, and aimed at a small soldier hiding behind a log with the sixth shot. It caught him clean through the leg. The soldier screamed, hand wrapped tight around the wound. When his friends tried to reach him, Barnes put a bullet through their throats. More explosions. The trees caught fire and illuminated the shadows hunkering for cover. Someone tripped a swinging branch and caught a face full of nails.

Then one of the fuse bombs detonated, tearing a hole into the mountain and setting off a rock slide. It caught a sniper and his spotter as well as the four men creeping along below.

Barnes picked off three more men. He sighted someone who looked in command, yelling into a radio and pointing out different people and took him out by the throat. He took out the second command and the enterprising soldier scrambling for the fallen radio.

By the time he heard the echoes of the chopper before it was in range, the harmonics catching and bouncing off the mountain, four-fifths of the men were down or dying. The rest were quickly making their way up the mountain to his nest. Barnes unsheathed his knife and cut the throat of the two men creeping through the undergrowth but he knew he couldn’t fight them all. Someone would get a lucky blow eventually.

The helicopter got louder, and he knew he was out of time.

The river was a ravenous monster curling from the mountain into the valley bellow. The Winter Soldier spent weeks tracking the current in its different stages of growth. He walked the edges, even waded out in the dry season to check for hidden boulders. The Soldier waited until just before the last bomb blew before rolling off the cliff into the rapids below.

He hit the water at a dive, the ground shattering ball of fire covering his splash. At this height, the impact was significantly less than hitting concrete but it was still enough to knock the air out of his lungs. The river didn’t wait for him to reorient but carried him along at twenty-five miles an hour. He came up for a lungful of air then swam with the current. He breached for air six more times before he was far enough away to rise and look around.

Eight miles ‘til the next waterfall.

A quarter a mile from the first drop – before the water pressure built so strong even his enhanced physique couldn’t fight it – Barnes guided his momentum to the riverbank. He climbed onto the pebbled sand and collapsed gasping for air. While the past four months in the mountains had given his muscles wry strength, his endurance was still recovering from years in cryo.

It was hard for an average man to keep up fat and mass living off the land. It was even harder for a soldier who burned off a day’s bounty of venison by breathing and his two and a half days of self-imposed starvation didn’t help.

If he was going to make it any farther he needed to eat and find a vehicle. Maybe a computer and cash if he was lucky.

Barnes picked his way over the boulders and stones pushed by the rushing water until he reached the grassy woods. It was impossible to move quickly through the dense thicket; tall, un-kept grass grew over and tangled around fallen logs or sticks and stones. He had to move carefully to not leave a trail. Occasionally he came across some animal trails and could move along the already bent grass.

The River had carried him down the mountains into the valley near where a small two-cart town had sprung up in the early 30s. Salt River revealed itself by the twinkling light of the single gas station. As he moved closer, houses and stores rose in dark hulking shapes along the flat horizon. People in this part of the country went to bed early. Barnes stayed still as one by one the lights winked out and the vague shadows of human dwellers vanished into bedrooms. The Soldier was quiet until the shadows were long enough to provide some cover.

He didn’t have much time.

The troops sent to the campground were combing the woods for him. A second battalion would be scouring the towns within forty miles of the base camp in search of strangers and odd happenings. He gave it half an hour before the trucks rolled in and woke the town. He moved quickly across the open space to the shadows of the first residence. It had bay windows low on the ground but he ignored it in favor of the screen door. People in towns like this trusted each other and rarely locked up.

Barnes unhooked the spring to keep it from squeaking and closed it softly behind him. He kept his knife out incase someone had a house pet. Cash was usually kept in three places – the bedroom, the office, and the kitchen. If a married couple owned the house the man sometimes left his wallet by the door to keep track of it. Barnes moved silently through the office and the kitchen, checking the cupboards, the drawers, and jars on the shelves. He stuffed his pockets with apples and crackers from the pantry.

He found a little cash stowed in an office safe and an old Windows 98 computer but nothing particularly substantial. Barnes turned his attention to the stairs, climbing the railing to avoid stairs that sagged and creaked.

The bedroom door was open so he scooted in, careful not to move the door in case the hinges squeaked. Two figures slept peacefully unaware of the assassin standing over them. They were an older couple, probably retired and living out the rest of their days in peace and quiet. It almost made the Soldier feel guilty.

Maybe this was a person thing. Maybe persons considered the circumstances of their victims before robbing them. He was kind of a person now. Person-ish, at least, but maybe being _more_ person-like meant leaving the grey-headed couple alone.

The soldier sighed, long and silent, and climbed out the window to the next house.

There must be rewards for person-like behavior because the next house was loaded. He must have had seven hundred dollars in his desk drawer and another thousand in the wall safe. He also had a thin, silver laptop, which the Soldier unplugged and tucked under his arm. Barnes grabbed a set of keys from the wall next to the front door and stole the truck.

It was, the Soldier concluded, good enough to get started. He would have to dump the truck in a few miles, but hopefully it would get him to a larger town where a stranger would be less remarkable.

Satisfied, the Soldier known as Barnes packed up and left Wyoming behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, Bucky's logic is a lot screwed up in this chapter. To be perfectly clear: he's gained back some of his memories, but they are very jumbled up and he is not remembering everything correctly. He's still got a long way to go, but he's getting there. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the experiences and framework to recognize when his logic is screwed up.
> 
> Just so you know, Bucky is sniping the soldiers at just over a thousand meters. While still a thousand and some meters from the current world record, he is firing at night without a spotter. It's pretty impressive shooting.
> 
> I feel like I need to explain about the Hydra techs a bit, and why I made them so relatable. I mean, Rodriguez is a gay man in a highly homophobic organization who refuses to be intimidated by his superior. Gary protected the women under his command and comforted the new interns. Michaela Carson likes to dress pretty and gets slut shammed for it. They even have names!
> 
> I gave them these names and characteristics very deliberately.
> 
> I think there's a tendency within human nature to make monsters of those who do monstrous things, forgetting that had we been born in a different time or place we could very well have been the monster instead. This chapter has some very intentional throwbacks to Ordinary Men, a biography about the ordinary workers who became the Nazi soldiers who did horrible things during the war and why, as well as a grim reminder of the [Milgram Experiments](http://www.sasionline.org/survival/hunting-with-traps-and-snares/).
> 
> About surviving in the wild: 
> 
> Yes, [this](http://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/how-to-make-soap-from-ashes-zmaz72jfzfre.aspx#axzz3IzkWWnsp) is how you can make soap in the wild, and yes, how you can take care of your dental hygiene. Just make sure you make your toothbrush out of a non-poisonous tree. All it takes is a little poison oak sap for you to accidentally kill yourself. 
> 
> Two of the best ways to find water in an environment like Bucky's is by either an underground sill or a homemade filter. Click [HERE](http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/survival/wilderness/how-to-find-water2.htm) for illustrations and further instructions on how to make them.
> 
> Click [HERE](http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Snare-Trap), [HERE](http://www.outdoorlife.com/photos/gallery/survival/2013/03/how-build-trap-15-best-survival-traps), or [HERE](http://www.sasionline.org/survival/hunting-with-traps-and-snares/) for some diagrams of traps Barnes could make with the resources at his disposal and instruction on how to make them.
> 
> If you liked it, please leave comments and kudos. I'd love to hear what you think (and I'm very nervous and insecure about this chapter don't look at me.)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was beginning to dawn on Barnes that he didn’t have a choice. Either he went to Captain Rogers or he returned to being the Soldier.
> 
> He refused to be the Soldier.
> 
> Barnes slammed his hand against the dash and turned the truck to west toward DC.

Courage is the capacity to confront what can be imagined.

\--Leo Rosten

-*-

There are two questions to answer: one, how did they find him? And two, what to do now that he was ousted from his safe hiding spot?

The Soldier’d been cozied-up in the Mountains for four months in which time he’d only run across two hunters and a boy-scout troop and both times he remained hidden, observing the trespassers from a distance so it hadn’t been anything _he_ ’d done.

He couldn’t inspect his arm for tracking chips without tearing it apart irreparably and he no longer had the protection of miles of stone between his arm and the nearest radio tower. Even satellites had a difficult time reaching through the rocks of his cave where Barnes had retreated during the routine satellite passes. It was possible for Hydra to change the satellite schedule, but he’d believed they would have been more cautious. Perhaps he’d miscalculated.

If there _was_ a bug in his arm then Hydra could track him wherever he ran. He needed to either remove the bug or make himself such a threat they decided he wasn’t worth the hassle. Or, he mused, he could insinuate himself with someone they wouldn’t dare touch and let _him_ be too much hassle.

By now, Hydra knew his movements and habits. He’d blown up the cave but someone could rebuild his life by the animal skins stretched out on crudely made frames or the clothes still drying by the river. They could put together a pretty comprehensive mental map by the signs of self-maintenance and self-reliance, from the sophistication and improvements in his environment, from the herb garden started outside the cave to the lye soap by the river.

The adrenaline from the fight faded quickly and massive waves of emotion began to build. It was worse than detox; detoxification was a physical reaction and something he’d been trained to withstand, but rather than teaching him to deal with the side effects of emotional upheaval, Hydra had used drugs to suppress the emotions themselves. It was a tactical choice and had Barnes not been trying to regain personhood he might have even sought out the drugs and technical expertise required to keep his emotions in cowed. Emotions, he was learning, didn’t stay in your brain.

His stomach hurt when he thought about the Woman with the Wine-covered Dress or the Little Girl Crushed by the Wheels. His head ached and felt stuffy when his gun didn’t fire or his tires got stuck in the mud. Every time headlights passed him his adrenaline spiked, sure that they’d found his trail and were moving up to pin him.

Even worse, emotions controlled his thoughts, shoving pieces of memory and _sentiment_ at him every time he let his guard down. The road before him vanished into a torn up field lined with barbed wire and mines. There was a young corporal slumped in the seat beside him, a neat round hole in the high right of his forehead. His uniform flickered between green canvas and desert camo.

Barnes blinked, his heart seizing in his chest, and the corporal vanished while the wheel under his hands widened. The dashboard warped into the carriage of an old Ford delivery truck. “Just pull it around here, James,” said his father. His face was blurred. “I’ll just be a second. Stay in the car. Do you hear me, son? I need you to promise me. You _stay_ in the car.” After the third time he swerved around potholes that didn’t exist, Barnes pulled to the side of the road and rested his forehead against the steering wheel.

He was losing his mind.

He was sub-operational. The Soldier – no, no, he was Barnes now – _Barnes_ needed maintenance. The wave of dark feelings kept rising to the surface even though Barnes kept pushing them down. He couldn’t afford to go on stand-by with Hydra on his tail. He would not allow them to push him back into non-personhood even if it was easier.

Even though most of the emotions he felt were horrible and made him sick and scared, he knew that if he held on the good memories would return. This morning amid a memory of blood soaked clothes and the detonation of artillery he caught a glimpse of a baby’s smile. The baby wrinkled her nose at him and the Soldier felt warm like a coal was lit in his heart. He didn’t know who the little girl was yet, or the baby’s name but he wanted to remember. He _needed_ to remember. He wanted to know who James Buchanan Barnes was.

The Soldier tried to think about it logically. He couldn’t avoid Hydra for long; they’re arm was stretched too far and their resources were too great. Even if he ran he would always have to be on the alert and in his current compromised state he couldn’t defend himself from a highway robber. (He turned and checked the locks on the door).

He needed…help.

The Sold---Barnes! Barnes, darn it. He’d earned that bit of personhood. _Barnes_ was loath to admit it but his best bet was… Captain Rogers. Captain Rogers called him Bucky. Captain Rogers called him James Buchannan Barnes. Steve Rogers was intertwined and fused into every memory he had. Captain Rogers called him friend. Steve Rogers stopped fighting to prove it.

However, if felt a little humiliating to run to Captain Rogers now.

The Soldier was very familiar with humiliation and shame. They were training emotions meant to motivate efficiency and competence, but he wasn’t familiar with them in the context of tactical planning. It was the tactically sound choice to seek out Steve Rogers and request sanctuary. Tactically sound choices were a matter of pride.

But it felt like defeat.

Barnes realized he wanted to show up at Captain Rogers’s door as a full person. He didn’t want to be just person-ish, but a _real_ person able to make person-like choices and think person-thoughts. Even after seven months the Soldier…Barnes. Even after seven months _Barnes_ still struggled with what a person really _was_. After this week he thought emotions were a big part of it and he thought it had something to do with the awareness of other persons and he knew choices were the defining line between an _it_ and a _he._

He also knew there were a lot of pieces he was missing that he only recognized as absent like someone building a puzzle could see the empty spots. He didn’t know what went in those spots or what the pieces were shaped like; he just knew they were missing. It was humiliating to not recognize something children knew instinctively.

Barnes might have sat frozen indefinitely if it weren’t for the line of cars that zoomed past him on the highway. The wake of the cars rocked the truck and rattled him out of his headspace. His hand clutched at his gun but the line of cars didn’t stop. He realized it was simply the last of the evening traffic rather than a Hydra caravan and tried to steady his breathing. It was beginning to dawn on him he didn’t have a choice. Either he went to Captain Rogers or he returned to being the Soldier.

He refused to be the Soldier.

Barnes slammed his hand against the dash and turned the truck to west toward DC.

 

 

-*-

 

_South Bend Minimum Security Prison_

_Bentley, Iowa._

 

The prison stood alone on an empty field surrounded by barbed wire, concrete walls, and an empty blue sky. Steve stood in the Warden’s waiting room looking onto the basketball court below, his arms folded tightly across his chest. “Captain Rogers?” He turned and looked at the Warden. The Warden cleared his throat and stepped into the room. “The prisoner you requested to see… Gary—“

“Greg,” Steve corrected, turning and tucking his thumbs into his belt to make his shoulders wide and tall. The Warden’s eyes widened slightly eyes dropping to his clipboard and then, realizing what he’d done, he puffed up.

“Right,” he said. “Greg Barnett. Listen, Captain, I appreciate the Hydra threat like all and I respect your contribution but I don’t feel comfortable allowing a someone not sponsored, employed or endorsed by…anyone… in the US Government interrogate my prisoner. _Especially_ not someone whose been running around the world blowing up buildings and capturing random citizens and throwing them into detention facilities. I may have to abide by my government’s decision to incarcerate these men, but I sure as hell have the right to prevent you from infringing on their rights more than you already have. I have a dozen reports here from prison guards saying Greg Barnett is a model prisoner and I’m not going to let you roughshod over an old man because you’ve decided to relive the Red Scare. Barnett hasn’t even been put on trial yet!”

Steve waited until the Warden took a breath. “Are you done?”

“What?” the Warden snapped. Steve straightened and let his fingers drop to his sides.

“Because if you are, I’ll point out that everything I’ve done in the last four months has been sanctioned by what remains of Shield and the permission and support of not only your president but the authority of the UN. I’ll also point out that my being here is a courtesy. I’m not asking for permission, I’m giving you the privilege of helping me out.

“Now, either you can do your duty as an American Citizen and let me talk to the prisoner, or I will raise hell until not only have I talked to Greg Barnett but I’ve done it through a new Warden.” Steve stepped into the Warden’s space. “Have I made myself clear?”

Ten minutes later he stood on the other side of bullet resistant glass as two guards let a short man into an interrogation room and helped him sit down. Greg Barnett didn’t look like an evil man who’d worked for years to mercilessly and in remorselessly not only implemented but design ways for Hydra to strip a man of his humanity. He was an older white gentleman with soft grey hair and a neatly trimmed beard.

The guards treated him gently, not even cuffing him to the table. As he watched the guard lingered to chitchat. It seems reports of Barnett’s natural charisma were spot on. Steve’s teeth ground.

Sam came and stood beside him, a line of strength at his back. “Are you ready for this? We still have time to get Natasha down here.”

“No.” Steve said. They had so little intelligence on Bucky the folders in his hands were only a few pages thick and they still felt heavy. “I need to do this. If it doesn’t work then I’ll call in Natasha. Maybe she can talk to the warden, smooth some feathers while she’s at it.”

Sam snorted. “Yeah, right. I’ve never seen a man get so red in my entire life. I thought he was gonna have a heart attack. I don’t think even my momma could charm him into cooling off.” Steve snorted but stayed silent. By now he knew Sam used humor to soften admonishments and words of caution. Sure enough, after a moment Sam shifted on his feet and said, “I know you think you need to be the one to do this. And I know no one cares about Bucky more than you, but are you sure this is the right moment? You tore that Warden a new one he may not have deserved and if you don’t think you can keep your cool in there you shouldn’t go in. Barnett may be scum, but he’s got the same rights as any other American citizen.”

Steve left to go to the interrogation room. He didn’t bother with any theatrics, just walked in calmly and pulled out the chair across from Barnett. The room, small, grey and windowless, was interchangeable with a thousand other interrogation rooms across the world. He placed three files neatly on the table just out of Barnett’s reach.

“You’re an interesting man,” Steve began, still straightening the folders. “Everyone who worked with you said you’re just a sweet old grandpa, wouldn’t hurt a fly.” He looked up. “Your female co-workers called you their guardian angel. You’ve filed harassment complaints, restraining orders, reprimands for bullying. You even authorized the hiring of a disabled Marine into your research team. I mean, if I didn’t know any better I’d say you were the best supervising officer I’ve ever met.”

Greg sat silent and Steve leaned forward. “But I do know better. The thing I don’t get is why a man like you – dedicated, caring, socially aware – would support an agency that did things like this.” Steve flipped the folder open and laid out a set of photos. Bucky stared up out of the glossy pages, his eyes blank and his body bloody. In another, a man had put a collar around his neck, cinched so tight it was cutting into Bucky’s skin. Bucky was drooling, gasping for breath, his torture captured in laminated black and white. In the last picture, Bucky stood naked while some technicians measured and dressed him. The techs were smiling, laughing at each other over some inside joke while Bucky stood like an oversized doll.

Greg didn’t so much as blink. “I never approved their games,” he said calmly. He spoke slowly and clearly. “The asset isn’t a toy and as soon as I was promoted to supervising officer I put a stop to it. Horrible business. Unprofessional.”

“Yeah, you stopped the games,” Steve affirmed. “But you never tried to free him. I have here several reports, written and signed by you that state among other things—and I’m quoting here, ‘I recommend terminating Alice Witfield’s contract with us. She has repeatedly sought out the asset and tried to establish a human rapport, a rapport which could negatively affect the Asset’s mission and purpose.”’ Steve looked up from the folder. “I’d like to point out that we already found Alice Witfield’s body, just so you don’t feel the need to _lie_ to us about what any of this means. What I want to know is… how did you justify it.”

“Justify what?”

“How did you justify stripping a man of his humanity? How did you justify torturing—“

Greg lifted up a shackled hand in protest. “I didn’t torture anyone. There was no torture.”

Steve raised an eyebrow and placed a finger on one of the photos. “Then what do you call this?”

“Training,” Greg answered amiably. “You don’t keep an attack dog on the leash without training it, Captain! And, you need to stop thinking of the Winter Soldier as…as a man. It sounds harsh, but that thing was no more human than a computer, or…or a gun. It might have looked human but all that was left was the basic programming left by the Russians. Had I thought there was anything, anything at all that could be salvaged I would have.”

“A machine.” Steve repeated. “And machines express fear? Anger? Go on starvation strikes and get attached to their handlers? Because I have several reports here—“

Greg clicked his tongue. “Forget the reports, Captain, and listen to me. The Asset is not a person. It’s a weapon. Treating it like a person lowered mission efficiency and cost us lives.” He leaned forward and dropped his voice. “Do you realize what that thing was capable of? There were missions they’d just plop down on our desk and say get it done. They’d cost us dozens of lives. I sent out boys and they came back in scrap pieces. Then I get assigned to the Winter Soldier and you know what happened? The death count went down. Not by five or ten, or a dozen. By the _hundreds_. Instead of condolence letters and a flag I was giving these mothers their children back all while furthering the cause.”

“The cause,” Steve said.

“The cause for peace!” Greg sputtered. “What do you think we were fighting for? Some ancient Nazi dogma? We were fighting for world where everyone could be equal. Everyone could have a chance at peace, at freedom, at living like decent human beings under a benign, incorruptible government.”

“By killing billions.”

“By _saving_ trillions,” Greg said, almost fanatical. “Not just our children, but our children’s children, and _their_ children! No more of this higher class bullshit, or race supremacy, or suppression of the sexes! Freedom. _Real_ freedom. This is war, Captain Rogers. There are always casualties in war.” Then, after he took in Steve’s blank expression, he sat back hands lifted in a pacifying gesture. “And just to remind you, _we_ weren’t the ones who turned the Asset into that. We just inherited him from the Russians and at that point there was nothing we could do.” Greg lifted his shackled hands in a what-can-you-do kind of way. “It was out of our hands.”

Steve smiled and opened another folder but didn’t turn it around for Barnett to see. “Casualties.” Steve fiddled with the paper, a bitter smile at the corner of his mouth.

When he looked up his face was congenial. “You’re right, Greg. There are casualties in war so let me be clear.” He leaned forward. “I want to know everything about the Asset, everything you did, everything you know about how he thinks, how he reacts, and all the ways Hydra’s tracking him. And then, you’re going to tell a circuit of judges and a room full of your peers the same thing you told me. You’re going to make it very clear how much autonomy the Winter Soldier in his crimes, which will be _none_ , and when they offer you a way out you’re not going to take it. You’re going to accept a maximum sentence and you’re going to spend the rest of your days locked in a little tiny cell until you die from loneliness.”

Greg laughed. “Why on earth would I do something like that?”

“You’re going to take _my_ deal, Greg, because if you don’t I’ll make sure you never have a day of peace in your life.” Steve turned the page and pushed it over. “I’ll break you out of prison if I have to and put you in a very dark, very deep hole and give you just enough light to see your own misery and it still wouldn’t scratch the surface of what you’ve done.”

Greg touched the document in front of him. “This is…”

“It’s the list of crimes you very conveniently forgot to mention that we don’t have sufficient proof to convict you for, but I don’t imagine many of those world leaders, especially the Chinese government or the North Koreans, are going to be happy about even the implication of guilt. I imagine if this list got out you wouldn’t be very safe even in solitary confinement of a Super Max.”

“Why are you doing this?” Greg pleaded, face almost as white as his beard.

“Because that asset, that “thing” as you called him? Is my best friend. I burned all of Hydra once for touching him, what do you think I’m going to do after I found out they tortured him for seventy years?”

Steve leaned forward and placed a recording device on the table between them. “Now, if I’ve made myself _abundantly_ clear…start talking.”

 

-*-

 

Captain Rogers’s apartment stood empty and cold. There was dust on the mantle, dust on the sheets, dust on the doorknobs. The fridge was unplugged. Barnes stood helpless in the empty room, his hands lax at his side.

Before coming here Barnes had stopped by the Museum display for Captain Rogers. The banners and displays had convinced him, finally, of what his brain’d been telling him since Wyoming; He was James Buchanan Barnes. Rr at least had been once. He’d spent two days collecting all intel possible to negotiate a reasonable ceasefire between him and Captain Rogers hoping to negotiate for some freedom in addition to protection, but he hadn’t anticipated Rogers wouldn’t be where the Soldier left him. By the layers of dust on the shelves Rogers hadn’t been back for months.

Barnes let himself have thirty seconds to absorb the hit. Then he redirected and got moving. He set up the stolen laptop and hacked into the neighbor’s wifi. He began searching for Captain America, but the list of credible information was inundated with gossip and rumor. However, among the rampant speculation he found some links for foreign news which were focused on the current events rather than how Captain Roger’s continually dodged his Government subpoena.

Captain Rogers had been busy over the last few months.

        Hydra base destroyed in Kiev.

        Red Room archive raided in Moscow.

        Hydra base destroyed in Milan.

        General Liam Nievel brought up on charges for inhumane treatment of a prisoner and association with Hydra.

        Commandant Casimir Alloard of the French Army brought up of charges of keeping vital information from the state, conspiracy to commit treatment, inhumane treatment of a prisoner, and association with Hydra.

        90-year-old General Aleksander Lukin turned up with a bullet in his forehead after he avoided his UN summons.

        Hydra base destroyed in Sudan, Malaysia, Canada, and Mumbai.

        Red Room operatives uncovered in UN.

        Red Room remnants obliterated – literally, all that was left was a hole in the ground.

In four months the Captain and his team cut a bloody swatch through Europe, Asia, and the Middle East while Stark and his recruited S.H.I.E.L.D. agents burned the roots from within the American and Canadian boarders.

There was a posted list of Hydra operatives and supporters on the Government most wanted sites. The Soldier browsed for people he knew and was surprised at how many of its handlers and technicians were on the list. Greg’s trial was in two weeks. Anne Barton was in custody. Rodriguez was on the run and suspected to be in Mexico (that, the Soldier knew was wrong. Rodriguez couldn’t speak a word of Spanish. They’d have better chances in Japan and South Korea.) Carlton was sentenced to ten years in a maximum-security prison along with a dozen other agents and techs sentenced for crimes against humanity.

The ratio of Hydra agents working on the Winter Soldier project to Hydra agents in general was astounding and unlikely unless someone was intentionally targeting and hunting down the Winter Soldier Taskforce. The Soldier sat back in Roger’s kitchen chair and closed the laptop, disconnecting from the stolen Internet from the apartment beside them.

Captain Rogers was giving the Soldier seventy years of bloody vengeance. Some of the names on the list were old handlers resting in their nursery homes or playing with their grand kids. Even if the courts refused to convict them because of the Statue of Limitations their reputations and lives were ruined.

Barnes felt… warm. Like a gentle coal settled in his sternum and throat. His eyes burned and the lump in his throat was back but it didn’t feel crushing. The warmth made his flesh hand tingle to his fingertips. His toes curled in his boots.

No one had ever given the Soldier a gift before.

At the same time the headache was back. The soldier hadn’t known he could feel a positive _and_ a negative emotion in unison. It was an interesting discovery (to be explored at a later time) overshadowed by the pure ire rising from the Soldier’s stomach to his jaw. He ground his teeth.

Steve was _stupid._

The idiot didn’t have any backup except some wacko with metal wings and whatever raggedy bunch of troops he conned from the local government. There was no way Steve could be sure the men and women weren’t Hydra but he was trusting them with his back! He was such a blasted, hardheaded, didn’t have the sense God gave a half-witted mule, numbskull! Hydra was fat and overconfident from the last decades of hidden development but it hadn’t grown any less dangerous.

Captain Rogers was going to get his fool head killed and _then_ where would Barnes be. Rogers was off gallivanting around Europe trying to get his imbecile head knocked off and Barnes was stuck here.

Morose, Barnes clicked through the news feeds until a breaking headline popped up on the news dash. Captain Rogers had appeared before the Military Court of Justice to answer questions regarding Hydra and his methods in taking down the Helicarriers all those months ago.

Apparently, Barnes read, the Captain had left on his Hydra World Tour after the Helicarrier Incident and was unavailable for comment until a few days ago when he returned for his subpoena. He was scheduled to speak at a Veterans event on Wednesday and give the opening speech for the Red Cross’s newest fundraiser in three weeks. In the meantime, said Peter Parker of the Daily Bugle, he was staying at Stark Tower with the rest of the Avengers.

Barnes didn’t even care that the papers just gave away prime intelligence to every Tom, Dick and Harry with a grudge and a shotgun. He left the laptop and car keys on the table and bolted out the door.

 

-*-

 

Stark tower rose in a pinnacle of glass and steel in the New York skyline. There was some construction happening on the upper levels, but otherwise the outside was as smooth and impenetrable as a prism.

The Tower had multiple cameras on every entrance, which were operated by biometric scanners and keyed to retinal scans. Every window was made of bullet resistant smart glass and locked down tight with cameras imbedded into the concrete of the walls all the way to the third floor. A welcoming committee of very polite, very sweet ex-Special Forces greeted guests immediately while the scanners in the door collected their data so their biometric data could be tracked throughout the building.

He considered rappelling in but a brief survey of from the rooftops of the nearest, much less secure skyscrapers showed that the roof was lined with motion sensors and pressure plates. He’d been at this for two days now and he still didn’t have an entrance, much less an exit. “Kites and Fiddlesticks,” Barnes muttered, lowering the binoculars. “How paranoid is this bastard?”

Pretty paranoid, it turned out.

He heard the scrape of a shoe on the concrete and launched in a roll. Blue chemical darts splattered against the wall as the Soldier launched to his feet and ran to his escape route. A muffled curse and someone tore after him. Barnes ran like he was going to dive over the edge, then at the last moment kicked off the low wall toward his attacker. The man yelped and threw his weight back to stop his run. The Soldier fell upon him, feral and deadly.

One fist punched his throat – collapse the trachea, limit air, stun the attacker. The other tried to hit him multiple times in the ribs – first punch to crack it, second to break it, third to drive it into the man’s lungs. At the last second the man’s hands snapped out and diverted the last punch. The Soldier’s hands locked around the back of the man’s neck and pulled him in while driving his knee up.

Hard bone met soft cartilage.

The man howled and threw his weight forward, but the Soldier hooked an ankle around his leg and used the momentum to throw him on his face. Before the guard could catch his breath the Soldier pinned him in a half nelson chokehold. The guard bucked, trying to throw him off, but the Soldier was too strong and too experienced. The man’s struggles got more desperate as the oxygen in his brain was exhausted. His fingers dug bloody holes in the Soldier’s arm, and then fell limp.

The soldier waited at extra few moments to make sure the guard was unconscious before rolling off of him. He turned the man over. Strong jaw, ex-military training, cheap suit and a – he dug through the man’s pocket – Stark Security Officer Brent LaBron.

The soldier reached up and plucked a small, flesh colored earpiece and put it on. “…Bron. Come in. Are you alright? Have you identified the shadow?” The woman paused and said, “Who is this? Identify yourself.”

Barnes didn’t answer. He chucked the earpiece in case it was being traced and got the hell out of dodge.

On his way down the Soldier dodged several teams of security forces sweeping the floors. Security at the Stark Building would tighten now they knew someone was scouting for weaknesses. It was immensely… frustrating. That was the emotion. Frustration. To be aggravated when things didn’t go according to plan. Normally he’d be pleased to put a name to one of the reactions but right now it was overshadowed by the growing cramp of fear in his stomach.

Every day he was out of the mountains was another day for Hydra to triangulate the tracker in his arm. He needed to be under Captain Rogers’s protection or he’d be back in the Chair before breakfast.

It was looking more and more likely that not only was Barnes going to appear before Captain Rogers as not-personlike, he was also going to appear as the weaker party. He wasn’t even able to get into the Captain’s house on his own terms, much less negotiate a deal. He’d have the disadvantage on the terms and conditions of his surrender.

His stomach hurt.

Barnes didn’t think Captain Rogers would be like the others. His memories of when he was a person still floated in and out, sometimes as sharp and real as the knife in his boot, and sometimes as tangible of a snowflake in his palm – quick to melt under the heat of his regard. Even so, he thought Captain Rogers would never force him to sit in the chair and become a non-person again.

However, what if Captain Rogers wasn’t happy with the Soldier’s strides to become person-like and wanted to force the Soldier into the chair to become James Buchanan Barnes?

His stomach felt like fear and frustration were fighting for control. It made him sick. Barnes stopped running long enough to puke in an empty alleyway seventeen city blocks from Stark Tower. He stood with his head pressed against the cool metal of his hand while his mind spun itself in circles. His bone hand fumbled for the small pouch with the Gummy Bears to pull out Captain Yellow Bear.

The candy was a little sticky from the river and the colors had smeared together but Captain Yellow Bear was still mostly gold. He had a new green ear, but it was a casualty of war and a badge of honor. Barnes set Captain Yellow Bear upright on the dumpster lid.

“I…” Barnes said. “I don’t know what to do, Cap. I want to believe you won’t hurt me. You stopped hurting me before but maybe that’s because you thought I was a person. Maybe when you see I’m not a person you’ll—“ He choked, air catching somewhere between lungs and throat, and pawed into the pouch until he found Asset Bear. He turned the two pieces of candy until they were facing each other and tried again. “You see Cap,” he said in Asset Bear’s voice. “I’m worried you’re pinning your mission parameters around the fact that James Buchanan Barnes was a person, and when you realize that I’m not anymore—“ He stopped and breathed deep. “That you won’t think that the me _now_ is real. I can be a real person, Cap. You just have to give me a little… a little time, that’s all.”

His eyes leaked.

“I can do it, Cap. I—“ his voice malfunctioned.

Angrily, he snatched the two gummy bears and threw them at the back alley wall. “This is stupid,” he hissed, hands curled into fists. “I’m so…” He pressed his knuckles into his eyes to stop the leak.

“Steve,” he gasped to the darkness of his palms. “Steve, I want to go home.”

He stood quivering in the alleyway until his breath calmed. Eventually he brushed away the water from his face and went to rescue the Gummy Bears. Captain Yellow Bear was unharmed but Soldier Bear had landed in a puddle of garbage juice and needed to be cleaned off. Barnes wiped them carefully.

“Don’t know why all the fuss,” he said as he tucked them in with the others. “Isn’t like I got a choice anyhow.”

 

-*-

 

He decided to make himself as person like as possible before seeing Captain Rogers just incase. It had been three weeks since he’d last been able to self-maintenance. His clothes smelled like body odor and trash and people had begun to give him a wide birth, holding their noses as they walked by. A group of teenagers started yelling at him as he walked. Barnes moved out of their way but they kept spitting insults even as he left them behind.

Barnes walked to the local strip mall in search of a barber but the shoppers kept glaring at him. Barnes’s eyes slid to the side to prevent eye contact like he’d been trained, but he quickly realized they were as little interested in making eye contact as he was. However, he noticed, peeking out from a matted curtain of hair, they had no problem making eye contact with their equals. That must be another person-like behavior he’d forgotten.

Barnes ducked his head and looked around for the spinning white and red candy cane that marked a barbershop. He eventually found one, the glass door declaring “UNISEX HAIR CUTS” in big and bold red letters. Barnes was moving toward the door when a man in a suit – tall, thin, calluses only on the middle finger and thumb, no threat - pressed in front of him. The man looked Barnes up and down, his lips curled up and nose wrinkled.

Barnes flushed hot and cold. His hand, lifted to push at the door, raised further to brush his hair away from his face as he moved on, pretending like he’d never intended to open the door in the first place. The man watched him, eyes narrowed. Barnes wandered around the strip for a little bit, just long enough to see the man leave and talk himself into trying again.

This time he got as far as the front, but through the glass he saw a line of chairs with the men and women standing over them, knives between their fingers. He kept walking.

He felt stupid the moment the shop was behind him so he circled the block and tried again.

The chairs were padded, yes, but no one was laying back or wearing the Programming Equipment. He pulled the door open and stopped. On the far wall was a line of padded chairs with large domes lowered over the craniums of the customers.

Barnes turned and walked away. His breath caught and the world spun while he tried to breathe until the Soldier was hunched over, pressed against the sun warmed bricks of the building. He sucked in deep pulls of air until the buzz in his ears stopped. Gradually, the ringing was overlaid by a gruff voice saying, “That’s it, son. Just in and out. You’re doing great. In….out… in…out… in…out. You’re okay. You’re in New York and you’re safe. Breathe deep.”

The world came into focus. An old, African-American male in a black apron stood in front and a few feet back, his arm stretched out to keep the small crowd of gawkers from coming closer. “Are you with me, son?” asked the old man. He had a soft white beard and a smooth bald scalp.

The soldier nodded weakly. “Yes, sir.”

“Do you need to sit down? There’s no shame in it.”

His legs folded like they’d been waiting for permission. Barnes slumped against the pavement, forehead pressed to the wall, and watched with wary suspicion as the old man slowly lowered to the ground. He moved stiffly; probable arthritis in the joints of his knees and ankles, bones fragile from typical calcium degeneration in men over fifty.

Once he settled the old man just sat quietly as the crowd around them dissipated and normal traffic resumed. The silence was comfortable. Barnes picked at his fingernails, tugging on this hair as he scanned the faces passing by. Eventually the man pulled out a package of white sticks and offered one. The Soldier had seen the Handlers, soldiers and Technicians with the white sticks in their mouth but he didn’t know what to do them. Rather than admit this, he shook his head but watched carefully as the old man shook one out. The Old Man placed the brown end between his thin lips and lit the end with a Zippo.

The soldier rested his head on his knees as the smoke curled and dissipated.

Finally, the man said, “You serve, son?”

The Soldier looked up, eyes sliding to the side of the old man’s face. The old man nodded and breathed out smoke, exhaling it through his nose like a dragon. “I served two tours in Vietnam. After I finished putting myself back together I went back with the Red Cross and tried to pick up the pieces. Hell of a thing.” He pulled another drag. Breathed it out slowly. “Hell of a thing.”

Barnes swallowed thickly and brushed damp eyes against his sleeve. He didn’t want the leak to return here. “I just wanted a haircut,” he said to the bricks. His voice cracked on the vowels.

“Well shucks, son,” said the Old Man. “Sometimes those “just” moments are the hardest part.” Barnes peeked at him, gaze as close to eye contact as he dared. The old man ducked to meet his gaze, steady and calm when Barnes’s eyes broke away. “Tell you what. Why don’t you come on back and I’ll give you a trim. No sharp knives, no scissors, I’ll just use a safety razor quick and simple. You can even sit outside on the ground while I touch it up.”

The Old Man gently coached Barnes to his feet and let him around to the back of the building. The Old Man dragged out some couch cushions set them up close to the wall and the door so in such a way that the Soldier could keep an eye on both the alley and inside the building. He showed Barnes the clippers and let him turn them over until the Soldier was satisfied that the Old Man lacked the physique necessary to turn them into a fatal tool.

“I’m just gonna give you a good old fashioned Ivy League. Little longer than a crew cut, easy to maintain, and easy to keep clean.” The old man settled in behind him and said, “Okay, let’s go.”

It was less painful than hacking at it with a knife. The electric buzzer didn’t tug and catch, and the Old Man didn’t need to lather up the skin. Occasionally he shifted around to reach another angle but he always told the Soldier before he moved. The hum against his scalp was almost pleasant. The old man worked quickly and efficiently as a fall rain of hair floated down onto Barnes’s shirt. He handed Barnes another razor and guided him in how to shave his cheeks. When he finished the old man used a round brush to clean off the fallen hair. “There,” he said sitting back. “Handsome fella.”

Barnes looked up bashfully and lifted his right hand to run his fingers over his hair. The bristles tickled his palm.

The old man wrapped up his razor and tucked it back inside the door. He waved away Barnes’s crumpled cash. “Take it as a favor, from one old soldier to another.” He offered him a pop and rested sat back down on the doorstep. “Where you headed now?”

Barnes turned the coke around in his hands. “I… I have a friend. Haven’t seen him since before I… We kind o-of left off at a bad place but I thought maybe it was time to mend some bridges.” He looked up and offered a grimace. “Tell the truth I don’t know where else to go, but I figured I didn’t want him to see me… like…” His voice failed. It was doing that a lot recently. He ignored it in favor of taking a sip and savoring the burst of sugary syrup across his tongue.

The old man hummed thoughtfully. “Way I see it,” the man said slowly. “Isn’t a friend who doesn’t want to know their pal is alright.”

Barnes looked down. “But, I’m not… n-not the same p-per—“ he stopped. Restarted. “I’m not the same man he knew. ’m not even sure who that was; I got my bells rung pretty good so sometimes I don’t even know if I’m a whole person anymore.”

“Course you are,” exclaimed the old man. “You’re just as whole as me. Tell you what – go see your friend and if he doesn’t take you back you come here and let Ol’ Jerry know. I’ll go talk to him.” His smile was full of childlike glee and he playfully elbowed the soldier in the side. “I’ll show him how to _really_ have a fight.”

Barnes grinned at him, shy and sweet.

“Now,” said the Ol’ Jerry. “We got to get you some other clothes to go with your new haircut.” It turned out Ol’ Jerry lived in an apartment at the back of the barber shop (which he’d owned since the sixties) and was more than willing to open up his shower for the Soldier’s use. Barnes yelped when he stuck his hand into the spray. The water was _warm_.

Ol’ Jerry knocked to check on him and reminded him he could all the soap and shampoo he wanted. There was a spare razor on the sink for his beard.

When he stepped out, Ol’ Jerry handed him a pair of worn jeans and a clean blue button up shirt. “I put your other stuff in the wash,” he said. “You can have these. They belong to my son but he’s all grown up and making cakes down in Brooklyn. You’re a little broader in the shoulders and smaller in the waist, but I imagine it’ll do fine.”

Barnes stood at attention in front of Ol’ Jerry as the old man tucked and straightened the clothes until he was satisfied. This, at least, was familiar. “There,” he said at last. “Fit as a fiddle.” Barnes relaxed enough to play with his cuffs. The wool glove on his left hand threatened to slip off but Ol’ Jerry didn’t make like he’d noticed anything different.

“Thanks,” Barnes said haltingly.

The man scoffed. “No need. I remember my own homecoming plenty well; Protest banners and signs disavowing the soldiers. People screaming I should just go and die. I don’t want that for any other boys returning home.” He smiled tiredly. “Now, enough excuses. Go find your man.”

 

-*-

 

The Soldier traced his steps back to Stark Tower one heavy step at a time. He pulled Captain Yellow Bear out as he walked and practiced what he was going to say. Should he start with “Sorry I shot you?” or maybe cover his bridges with a nice, easy “I surrender.” Maybe he should just drop to his knees and let them figure it all out.

In the end it was a moot point because the moment Barnes stepped into the courtyard in front of Stark Tower his throat decided to close up so tight he couldn’t have squeaked if his mission depended on it.

This was it.

He was doing it now.

Any minute he was going to walk into the Tower.

Barnes, the Soldier, the Soldier rolled the small yellow candy bear into the palm of his hand and curled his fingers tight. He had two choices: to walk away and become the nameless soldier again. Or move forward and all that he had for everything of worth. Barnes set his shoulders and told the parts of him that were less than person-like _this is your mission. Walk up to that building and through the glass doors. Don’t attack anyone._

He felt the calculation of the Soldier and determination of the Asset settle over him like an old familiar cloak. He had a brief flash of fear when the calm coolness of the Soldier and the blank imperative of the Asset felt more real than the emotional, chaotic mess of Barnes before everything vanished behind the mission. His body rolled forward coiled with menace and efficiency. The civilians made a hole, parting instinctively around the predator in their midst.

The Stark Tower doors slid open and he felt the laser of the bioscanner pass over him. He took two steps into the building when the meeting committee’s steps stuttered as he listened to the voice in his earpiece. Keen eyes shot up to the Soldier’s face as the receptionists ducked down behind their desks. The employees lingering in the atrium quickly made their way into a hallway and shut the heavy four-inch steel door behind them.

The Soldier kept walking.

More security filed in, their guns unsnapped and faces grim. Glass panels frosted as the building locked down. The Soldier stopped in the center of the room. Security guards slowly placed their hands on unsnapped pistols.

The Soldier stayed quiet as the Security spoke into their headsets. The elevators on the far end of the atrium slid open to allow a tall woman with black hair to stride into the hall. Her eyes were sharp, like fine point needles, and the Soldier raised his hands to thread across the back of his head. In his focus, he forgot his hand was still curled around Captain Yellow Bear. The woman’s eyes flickered up to his curled fist and a guard yelled, “He’s armed! Grenade!”

Security drew their weapons. The Soldier felt his heart seize, his eyes locking onto the security. He felt their designation shift from Warden to Target. Barnes fought the Soldier’s designations; he was _surrendering,_ damn it. The metal arm whirred, clicked.

One of the security guards – thin, big eyes – pulled the trigger.

The kid was a good shot, aim steady and hands firm. Blue ink spread across the Soldier’s chest like ice. He has a brief moment of – why blue? It should be red like the wild flowers growing between the rocks of the mountain – before the ice rose to his eyes. His mouth moved to say plaintively, “ _but I was surrendering”_ when unconsciousness overcame him.

Then there was only the dark.

 

-*-

 

The Soldier woke up in a sterile white room twenty feet by twenty feet by twenty feet with four white walls, a white floor, and a white ceiling. He was lying on a white cot in the corner with white sheets and a white blanket. The blanket was soft under the skin of his palm. Barnes rolled off the mattress and straightened the covers to military requirements. He didn’t touch the cot again.

The tile floor was cool under his bare feet but not painfully so. It felt more like an absence of heat than deliberate cooling. The grey cotton scrubs they put him in were light and airy but he didn’t feel cold.

Barnes moved along the edges of the room with his metal hand pressed against the walls. The walls were smooth until he got to the wall furthest from the cot. There was a slight seam about four feet across and seven feet tall in the middle. A doorway. The seam was so slight it was nearly invisible to the naked eye. Barnes worked at it with a fingernail of his bone hand but couldn’t catch the lip of the door.

He pressed his ear against the door and heard a faint humming sound like a high voltage cable. Barnes tapped the wall and the door with the knuckles of his left hand. The metal rung faintly in the empty room but the sound didn’t echo. Barnes looked at the room again.

There were no hooks in the ceiling and he didn’t see any outlets necessary for the electroshock therapy. The floor was made of even tiles which would get slippery if they water boarded him but would be easy to clean if he bled. So, they would beat him and perhaps use stun batons but they would take him somewhere else for recalibration. The Soldier walked to the center of the room contemplated his options.

He had his answer.

Captain Rogers did not see him as a person. If Captain Rogers did not see him as a person then he would try and recalibrate Barnes to bring back James Buchanan, other alias Bucky.

There was no exit from this room. Heavy electrical current lined the walls too thick to punch through, and given the response in the atrium his captors would be carefully monitoring the prison.

Barnes gambled and lost. All that was left was to accept the consequences.

The Soldier looked up at the small black camera blinking in the corner.

He folded his arms behind his back and knelt onto the tiles. He turned his focus onto an inch-by-inch section of the far wall and waited for the monsters to get him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the late chapter. My brother flew in from the USA and then we had guests for the weekend. On the upside we finally catch a glimpse of the very illusive and very ticked off Steve, Bucky's in Stark custody, the Gummy Bears return, and we've entered Part Two of this story. 
> 
> Historical trivia: African American men made up 12.5 percent of the army in Vietnam, which is huge when you consider that at that point in time they made up 11 percent of the USA population. They also had the highest number of casualties. 
> 
> If you enjoyed reading, please leave a kudos or a comment. I love hearing what you thought.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Is it really Bucky?” Steve demanded as he slammed through the door. He slowed down, breath caught in his chest. The far wall was taken up by a big screen showing Bucky unconscious on a small cot. His best friend was pallid and too thin but he was alive. He was clean and had a haircut and he was alive.
> 
> Sam, Hill and Stark stood arguing in the corner, but they’d stopped when Steve arrived. Sam walked over quickly and stood by his side, not touching, but close enough his body heat seeped in through Steve’s shirt. “He’s alive and he’s okay. A little malnourished and he’s got an impressive number of bruises but he’s here, Steve. We got him.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A very, very, VERY special thanks to [Kana_Go](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Kana_Go/pseuds/Kana_Go) who took my google translate Russian and turned it into something legible.
> 
> And a very, very, VERY special thanks to [M7nico](http://archiveofourown.org/users/M7nico/pseuds/M7nico) for taking my google translate Chinese and turning into something much, much, MUCH better.
> 
> I don't deserve either of you.
> 
> See bottom notes for trigger warnings about Dehumanization, Torture, and Dubious-Consent Touching (though that's included as a safety measure.) As always if there is something I need to warn for PLEASE LET ME KNOW.

 

“Funny thing how when you reach out, people tend to reach right back. Best, then, to make sure your hand is open and not fisted.”

\-- _Richard E. Goodrich_

*

“Help someone, you earn a friend. Help someone too much, you make an enemy.”

\-- _Erol Ozan_

*

“The challenge is trying to set people free, and help them be 'successful' in the world, which are almost always opposite objectives.”

\-- _Bryant McGill_

-*-

 

Steve’s legs itched too much to wait for the elevator. He burst into the stairwell and vaulted over the stairwell, leaping from landing to landing until he reached the lower basement. Tony had given the remnants of Shield the lower levels of the tower for a home base until they got settled. In return for running his security, Maria and her team got the best facilities and security money and Stark ingenuity could give. Unfortunately, it meant it took forever to clear the check lines. Steve hopped from foot to foot while Jarvis scanned his biometric data. He squeezed through the blockade door before it opened halfway and practically ran to Conference Room C, only slowing down to dodge personnel minding their own business.

“Is it really Bucky?” he demanded as he slammed through the door. He slowed down, breath caught in his chest. The far wall was taken up by a big screen showing Bucky unconscious on a small cot. His best friend was pallid and too thin but he was alive. He was clean and had a haircut and he was _alive._

Sam, Hill and Stark stood arguing in the corner, but they’d stopped when Steve arrived. Sam walked over quickly and stood by his side, not touching, but close enough his body heat seeped in through Steve’s shirt. “He’s alive and he’s okay. A little malnourished and he’s got an impressive number of bruises but he’s here, Steve. We got him.”

“We got him,” Steve repeated, eyes fixed on Bucky’s face. “God, he’s—“ He forced himself to focus. “What happened?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” Tony said, jumping into the conversation. “And it’d be a lot easier if someone’s trigger happy goon squad hadn’t shot my only informant.”

Maria glared at him. “We thought he was armed.”

“Yes! With little moldy gummy bears, oh what a horror. What was he gonna do? Choke you with them? Maybe increase you’re blood sugar and give you diabetes?” Tony spun a tablet across the table to Steve. It was playing the security image from early this morning. Steve watched Bucky stride through the front door, blank faced and menacing, walk into the middle of the room and wait until security filed in and Maria arrived to slowly raise his hands to his head. One of the men at the side yelled. Icers flew and hit Bucky twice in the chest and once in the back before Maria yelled a ceasefire. His grip tightened on the glass and metal screen until his knuckles turned bone white. _Thank God they weren’t using live rounds_. “My security’s been getting a little twitchy – not that Miss Secret Agent isn’t always twitchy – but this time they thought someone was scoping out the building. Jarvis tracked a new face lingering on the block; normally that’s not unusual – people go to work, people come back, we’re by a very convenient subway station, yada yada yada—“ Stark broke off and Maria continued.

“It’s not unusual to have repeat faces, but few people look at the building with intent. This guy practically set up house in the park and watched our people coming in and out for days. We asked some of the surrounding buildings for access to the high-rises and noticed him scoping us out from nearby rooftops.” Maria’s face smoothed out. “I sent one of my men to question him and he sent him to the hospital. Shattered face, broken ribs, punctured lung. LaBron’s good at what he does. The man was no amateur.”

Maria jabbed at her tablet and sent some files over to Steve. “Check out the surveillance from the last two weeks. Notice the face in the background? Long hair, scruffy beard, black hoodie.” Steve saw the figure in question lingering on the corner in one screen and sleeping on a park bench in the next. “Now check here.” The man was walking by the front door, his face shadowed with the brim of his hat. Even with the several weeks growth and the mat of hair, Steve would recognize Bucky anywhere. “LaBron confirmed this man got the jump on him last week.”

“Why didn’t we pick up on this before?”

“We’re lucky we picked it up at all,” Maria said, hands pressed against the table. “This Winter Soldier guy is good. Very good. If it weren’t for the fact that Jarvis is on high alert since you’ve been back it might’ve slipped by us entirely.”

“Don’t call him that,” Steve snapped, eyes lingering on the haunted face behind the glass. Now that Maria pointed it out he saw Bucky always stayed in the corner of the footage behind a crowd of fast-moving people. He looked like just another homeless guy looking for a place to sleep. His eyes lifted to the big screen just to assure himself Bucky was really here. He was safe. “How is he?”

Bruce shifted in his seat at the end of the table. He took of his glasses and wiped them, mouth pinched in thought. “Dehydrated. Malnourished. Exhausted.” Bruce rubbed his forehead and sighed. “I’ll be honest, Captain, I’m not sure what I’m dealing with. If your theories are right, Sergeant Barnes has some bastardized form of the super serum floating around; I don’t know how that’s going to affect his base levels or nutrient needs. That’s not even counting the massive energy draw from the metal arm.

“I can tell you his BMI is way too low, and he needs as much water as we can give him. That’s not even adding in all the information we don’t know about how Hydra treated him. I’d love to get a brain scan and a few x-rays, but that’s not going to happen without a few thousand dollars of damage and a lot of trauma on both ends. We detected a signal coming from the arm. Jarvis is blocking it for now.” Bruce studied the sleeping face on the TV. “He looks like he’s been on the run for a long time.”

Steve swayed. He felt Sam’s hand curl around the back of his elbow and leaned back into the man’s strength. Sam pushed him toward one of the roller chairs and sat beside him. Steve looked at him. “What now?”

“Now?” Sam said. “Now we play it by ear. Unless you’ve got an expert on brainwashed, super soldier, ex-assassin cyborgs I don’t know about, in which case we got to talk because first of all – sharing is caring, and second: _your_ _life_ , man.”

Maria twitched. Sam, Steve and Tony turned to her with raised eyebrows. Maria stared back, blank faced. “What?”

“Seriously?” Stark said.

Maria met his skeptical look evenly. “You fly around in a metal suit without wings, Stark. Don’t tell me Shield didn’t have a corner on the weird.” She sighed and her iron straight posture loosened a little at the shoulders. “Unfortunately, Dr. Burns is deep underground. If she’s still alive we can’t find her.”

“That’s if she’s not Hydra,” Sam muttered.

Maria’s smiled grimly. “If she is then she’s very good at hiding it. Dr. Burns earned her expertise working on Natasha and moved up from there. If she was dirty Natasha would have seen it.”

“Like she saw the multi-headed snake in the grass?” said Stark. He stopped and snapped his fingers. “Oh, wait.” Maria didn’t dignify that with a response but then again Stark didn’t seem to need one. Natasha had a very different reaction to someone trying to get inside her head than she did an organization she trusted and, to a very large degree, could control. Tony dropped into his chair and spun, head tilted back. “So, here’s where we’re at: we have big, metal and snarly locked up the Hulk’s Room. He isn’t getting out of there without a serious amount of firepower and an impressive amount of cunning considering who built it. I.e. – me. Second, Big, Metal and Snarly is also Big, Metal and Crazy, and we don’t have a shrink qualified to deal with him. Am I the only one wondering why we’re not just locking him up and throwing away the key?”

He looked at Bruce. “If it’s the room I can build you a new one.”

“We’re not locking him up,” Steve said through an impressive snarl of his own. “If you try I’ll break him out of there myself.” Sam’s hand clamped down on the back of his neck.

“And that leads us to fact three!” Stark continued. “Which is Big, Tall and Spangly over here is his best friend. Which means we have to try. But Cap, you gotta know that’s not your friend in there. I wish to God it was—well, if I believed in God I’d wish—oh, you know what I mean. If it was Rhodey or Pepper I’d be banging down the doors before you could say…whatever it is old timey people like you say.”

“Tony…” Bruce admonished quietly.

Stark grimaced apologetically and tried again. “What I’m trying to say, Cap, is this isn’t going to be easy. Not for you, not for him, and certainly not for my people in the line of fire. And yes, Hill, they are _my_ people, shut up. What I’m trying to ask is what are you going to do if you _can’t_? If he’s nothing but the robot they made him out to be?”

Steve looked from the circle of carefully blank faces to the man sleeping on the TV. Bucky lay face up exactly as they’d laid him, his cheeks hollow. The camera directly above the bed captured the dark rings of fragile paper-thin skin under his eyes. Like he’d felt Steve’s eyes on him, Bucky’s eyes snapped open. “He’s awake!”

“What?” Stark’s chair almost tipped over. “Those things aren’t supposed to wear off for another two hours!”

They crowded around the screen as Bucky stood up from the cot and looked around the room. “What’s he looking for?” Bruce asked as Bucky ran his hands along the walls until he found the thin seam of the door.

“An exit,” replied Steve grimly. They watched until Barnes returned to the center of the room. When Barnes threaded his fingers together behind his back and knelt Steve’s jaw clenched tight as Sam let out a few choice words. Steve turned to Tony, the muscle in his jaw tight. “What did he have on him when he came in?”

“What?” Tony was pale, his hands clenched at his sides. He took a moment to process Steve’s question. Finally he blinked rapidly, fingers pinching the bridge of his nose. “Um, clothing: button-up and jeans, socks, combat boots, a knife and…” Stark looked up. “He had a weird leather pouch. At first we thought it was a weapon or poison or something. Turned out to be a bunch of old gummy bears. It’s a kind of candy made of—“

“I know what it is,” Steve cut him off. “What did he have in his hand when Hill’s men shot him?”

Stark’s face firmed. “A yellow gummy bear. Cap, I know what you’re thinking but we don’t know what’s in those things. We don’t know if he laced them or if… we won’t know until we’re done running them.” And in order to test the candy for poison they had to dissect them and run them through acidic chemicals. Steve shook his head firmly.

“I need those bears, Stark. Now. Don’t bother with the tests – if Bucky wanted to be dead he wouldn’t have to eat cyanide to do it.” And that thought hit Steve in the gut. He looked at the image on the screen.

Stark looked at Banner, who shifted uncomfortably, but didn’t say anything. Maria looked from one man to the other and ordered someone to bring the gummy bears to the Conference Room C. “And that’s something you don’t say everyday,” she muttered when she was done.

-*-

There were nineteen bears in total, each one stickier and grimier than the last. Steve tried to rub them clean, but even after he cleaned off the gunk they still smelled like river and brine. “They’ll harden eventually,” Sam said as he scrubbed a green bear with a dishrag. “My sister buys these in bulk for her kids during Halloween but she never really gets around to distributing them until they’re all dried up and hard.” Sam had a line of green bears already clean by his elbow while Hill worked on the blues. Stark poked at the reds with a disgusted nose wrinkle, but sat down with the rest of them. They worked quickly. In the twenty minutes since he’d knelt Bucky hadn’t moved once except to blink.

“You know,” Sam continued as he set the green bear down with the others. “If he’s kneeling like that it means its what he’s trained to do. It means he expects something, whether it’s to be hurt, or given a mission, or whatever.” Steve kept his focus on the red bear pinched between his fingers as Sam talked. “Whatever it is you won’t know until he reacts. Either he’s gonna try and push you to it, get it over with, or he’s going to try and keep you from it. Whatever it is you’ve got to be ready.

“You have to follow his lead in this. Push if he wants to be pushed, draw back if he flinches. And whatever you do, do _not_ touch him if he flinches.” Sam finished the last bear and slid the bunch of them carefully into the hand stitched leather satchel, which he knotted and placed in Steve’s hand. “I’ll be outside the whole time, okay?”

Stark flittered over, “I know I’ve said this oh… a couple hundred times already, but are we sure putting Mr. Star Spangled Target in the room with the assassin programmed to _kill him_ is a good idea?”

Sam shrugged. “No better way to test how he wants to play this.” And out of all of them, Steve was the most likely to come out of this with both Bucky and himself intact. Warm eyes looked Steve over one more time before Sam nodded and pushed him toward the door. “You can do it, Cap.”

Steve nodded and set his shoulders. He ignored the uncomfortable churning in his gut as he picked up the tray with soup and water and walked to the door of the cell. He focused on making sure the soup didn’t slop over the side and keeping the glass balanced, and the yards between the conference room and the Hulk Cage disappeared until the door was right in front of the toes of his boots. Steve breathed in deep and let the calm settle over his shoulders.

When he felt settled he nodded to the Doorman.

Like all Stark Technology the Hulk room straddled the line between science and magic. The molecules of the walls and door were some kind of self contained magnetic molecule bound by some electromagnetic field which in short meant the Hulk could pound himself into shreds against a material that reformed even as it broke. It also meant the door dissolved into nothing when deactivated.

Steve ducked through the melting door and stopped just inside, soup and cup and gummy bears forgotten as he stared at Bucky. Bucky, who’d been missing for a year. Bucky, who Steve was so scared had been recaptured by Hydra. Bucky was still kneeling on the floor, hands on behind his back.

All of Steve’s great plans about going slow and letting Bucky set the pace flew right out the window, over the fire escape, down into the back alley, and into the dumpster. He dropped the tray, careful not to spill it only because _who_ _knew_ _when_ _Bucky_ _last_ _ate_ , and rushed to his friend’s side. “Bucky. Bucky, no. Get off your knees.” He tucked his hands under Bucky’s arms like a parent lifting a sleepy child. It didn’t occur to him to be scared; Bucky’s legs trembled as he stood, his eyes fixed on a point beyond Steve’s left ear. Steve tugged his hands out from behind his back and rubbed the blood back into Bucky’s arm and shoulder. Bucky’s skin and bone arm was ice cold through the scrubs.

“Let’s get you warmed up, okay?” Steve ignored the way Bucky’s eyes flickered from the wall to his hands and back, wary like a plenty beaten dog faced with a new master. He tucked an arm around taut shoulders and led him to the cot. Bucky moved stiffly, shoulders drawn up and muscles clenched. Steve sat him down gently on the bed, heart aching at how submissively Bucky dropped onto the mattress. “Let’s get your feet up and warm. Here, lift up a minute so I can get the blanket.” Steve knelt beside the bed as he tucked the blanket around his friend, fluffing the pillows so he had a descent backrest. “Socks,” he muttered as he rubbed Bucky’s toes firmly between his palms until ice white skin turned warm pale pink. “They couldn’t give him some damn socks?”

When Bucky looked physically comfortable – if as stiff as a cardboard cutout – Steve darted back for the soup. It was potato cream mixed with some sort of supplement good for starving people. He’d tried some before and while it wasn’t going to win any chefs awards any time soon it was warm and tasty. He set the tray across Bucky’s lap and handed him the plastic soupspoon.

The way Bucky looked at him was heartbreaking.

He didn’t actually look at Steve. His eyes flicked in Steve’s general direction, small sharp glances from the corner of his eye that didn’t actually focus on _Steve_ as much as his general direction. His eyes pinched in the corner, mouth open a fraction of an inch that on anyone else would look blank, but on _Bucky_ read as heartbreakingly confused.

“Eat,” Steve said, closing Bucky’s hand around the spoon. His hand tightened as he slowly lowered it into the bowl. Bucky lifted the spoon to his lips and paused, the lip of the spoon on his mouth, watching Steve. Then, all at once, he attacked the bowl of soup with the fervor of a rabid dog. He abandoned the spoon entirely to scoop the bowl up and drink, hunched over like Steve might try to snatch it away any moment. His water tipped and spilled onto the mattress but Bucky didn’t notice.

It hurt.

Steve sat back on his haunches and let his hands rest on his knees. He kept his body open and watched the door rather than Bucky. Eventually, Bucky chased the last drop and let the bowl fall to his lap. He arranged the bowl and the abandoned silverware, head bowed. His left hand plucked at the sheets, twisting into the blankets.

The hand must have been more sensitive than believed, because Bucky began feeling around the wet spot left behind by the spilled water. His hand patted at the covers, gently at first, and then more frantically as he tried to mop up the water stain.

Steve reached out, to stop him or comfort him, he didn’t know and Bucky froze. His hand stopped mid-pat and hovered there. He was so still Steve didn’t think he was breathing, eyes fixed on the hand reaching toward him. Steve swallowed. His hand dropped back to his lap but the spell was broken. Bucky watched him suspiciously. “Buck—“ he stopped.

Sam had contacted some trauma specialists in the area after they began looking for Bucky but none of them were equipped to deal with a case like James Buchannan Barnes; the flood of information was confusing and many times contradictory, and the only thing they all agreed on was giving Bucky the right to define himself on his own terms.

Sam took Steve aside when all the advice and counsel got too overwhelming. “Listen,” he said. “This sounds complicated but it’s really not. It’s not complicated, just _hard_. When we find Bucky—“ and God bless Sam Wilson for always saying _when_ not _if,_ “you can’t treat him like he’s the same guy you knew in 1944. No one can go through all this and come out the same person. That may mean learning new favorite foods, or speaking Russian; it can be something as big as a personality shift. Whatever it is, you have to accept him for who he is now.”

If any of the counselors or Sam or Natasha or hell, even Stark got right it was this: it wasn’t easy.

“Is there something you’d like me to call you?” Steve asked. He didn’t know what he’d do if Bucky asked to be called the Winter Soldier. Smile, nod and scream in his own quarters, probably. “I know I’ve been calling you Bucky, but if there’s something else…” he breathed in and tried to radiate calm acceptance. “Another name you’d like me to…?”

Bucky didn’t so much as blink.

“Okay,” said Steve. “Okay.” He pulled the blanket up around Bucky and tucked the edges under his legs. When Bucky was as comfortable as Steve could make him, Steve fell back against the wall and propped his forearms on his knees. He leaned his head against the wall and turned to watch his friend. “Listen. I don’t know what’s going through your head. I don’t know why you decided to come back, or what you want, but I know this, Bucky. I know this. I’m glad you’re here. I know I will always protect you. I know I will _never_ hurt you.

“You’re my friend. Whoever you are now, whomever you’re going to make yourself, you _are_ my friend, and nothing is going to change that. Don’t worry about spilling the water. There’s more where it came from. You don’t even have to talk if you don’t want to. I know this room is big and scary, but it’s just for a little while. Just until we’re sure you’re safe. No one coming through that door is going to hurt you, Buck—“

Somewhere in his monologue Steve’s eyes had dropped to his hands. He looked up now and felt his heart stutter. Bucky was looking back at him. His eyes focused a little to the left of Steve’s and his head was down but he was definitely looking back. Steve reached out again, and even though Bucky’s body locked up, he kept going until he could run his hand across the bristle of Bucky’s buzz cut. The short scruff was crisscrossed with white scars but it was neat and clean. “I like your hair,” Steve said, throat tight.

Bucky looked at him, wary and shy. Steve kept running his fingers through the bristly brown fuzz until Bucky’s eyes began to droop. Like a kid he kept forcing them open, eyes fixed as close to Steve’s face as his training would allow. His eyes fluttered and closed as his head tilted. He’d wake up with a jerk and look around frantically, eyes darting to every corner of the room before returning to the point just beyond Steve’s ear.

Bucky slowly leaned into the wall and gradually sank into a recline. Steve just kept threading his fingers through brown locks, occasionally rising on the tips of his fingers to scratch at spots of dandruff. Bucky’s blinking slowed, and then stopped, his breathing evened out in sleep. He could be faking but in the end it didn’t matter. Steve kept running his hand through his friend’s short hair.

_*_

Steve knelt at Bucky’s side until his knees were numb and jolts of pain shot up through his joints. Finally, after he’d had his fill of Bucky’s breathing, he dragged himself back into the command room.

The footage from the Hulk Room played across the screen in various angles. Stark, Hill, and Banner stood discussing the footage, occasionally pausing or rewinding a bit to dissect some more. There were guards, physicians, and psychologists crowded together, arguing over where to go from here. Michael Boris, Maria’s head of security watched the footage and the ever-rowdier crowd with narrowed eyes.

All the information Steve recovered from Hydra about the Winter Soldier was stacked in ten brown cardboard boxes at the edge of the room. Some of the boxes were half empty, their contents shuffled off to different translators, analysts, and scientists who worked day in and day out to decode the information. The papers in the box are haphazard chaos at best – memos in broken typescript, the spidery scrawl of an Italian technician detailing the correct method to recover the soldier from stasis, the brisk lines of mandarin script from Chinese scientist in charge when Russia lent the Soldier to Communist China ordering his men to equip the Soldier with rounds of poison gas.

Pages and pages of data scrambled into ten different languages, collected from three different organizations, and written by a few hundred personnel over the last seventy decades. A week ago, after they discovered Bucky hadn’t returned to _any_ pick up zone and was in fact missing from Hydra custody, the search for locations became secondary to the hunt for training protocols in the hopes that by figuring out what Department X, the Red Room, and Hydra did they could understand the Soldier’s thinking patterns.

It was slow going.

The fragile paper threatened to crumple as he moved the pages. Some of them were practically illegible, charred by a warehouse fire in 1991; others water stained and stiff from when Sam clipped a water pipe with his wings on a mission in Italy.

***

File # 62345b – 1

Director of Operations: REDACTED

Location: REDACTED, Russia

DATE: July 6, 1951

Selection from Section 2, Paragraph Six; of Soldier Upkeep

…However, as it has become clear that my advice on this matter is to be dismissed, I will let the matter rest and transfer the Codename: REDACTED to you by the end of the month, as well as the required maintenance paraphernalia. At the very least, I request you keep the Codename: REDACTED from New York; THE NEXT TWO PARAGRAPHS ARE ILLEGIBLE DUE TO WATER DAMAGE.

In regards to the maintenance and training itself, the juvenile and idiomatic slang, “wiping” is deceptive in name. A full “wipe” is possible, but I must severely discourage it as a full “wipe” removes all experience, common sense, and tactical expertise that makes the Codename: REDACTED such a valuable asset to Department X.

The Blank Slate Protocol must only be used if the PP exerts dominance of the SP. The one time we used the protocol we had to rebuild the Codename: REDACTED from scratch. It had no situation awareness, or knowledge of combat, or indeed, any form of evident intelligence, and resisted the handlers out of basic animalistic instinct. The only memory retained was muscle memory.

We had to re-indoctrinate it using time consuming techniques such as electroshock therapy, exposure therapy, mental and physical recalibration, and emotional trimming. All of these are time consuming tasks, and risky to the handlers.

The PP rose to the surface several times, a grim reminder that while REACTED has been subdued for now, he lingers in the subconscious of the Soldier waiting for the opportune moment to direct the Codename: REDACTED in his wishes.

When you perform the so-called wipe on the Soldier, please focus your attention on the short-term and midterm memory areas as shown, the hippocampus, and the area that creates and stimulates desire…(THIS SECTION DETAILS MACHINERY USE AND BRAIN SCHEMATICS AND CONTINUES FOR SEVERAL PAGES.)

…The exact dosages for each area are calculated to stimulate the preferred effects. For example, it would hardly be desirous for the Soldier to become affectionate, or considerate, or compassionate. However, fear and a desire to please are exceptionally motivating. Similarly, if the Soldier needs to be wiped, it is good to keep the muscle and tactical memory of an operation, so that mistakes are never made again.

As for memory, all moments of training have been stored in the long-term area of the brain. Undesired incidents must be wiped immediately before they settle into this area, as the training and calibration must be maintained at all times.

This is to ensure the Soldier never rebels.

 

A handwritten note in cramped cursive said _:_

_Dr. Brochezni is an idiot._ _See Lukin, File_ _5119-098 for handler protocols._ _Wiping still last resort. Handler protocol rendered good results. Max time out of storage increased to five months._

Then another note clipped onto the side by a wire paperclip wrote in different handwriting:

_Degradation of the Codename REDACTED has prompted us to return to Dr. Brochezni’s protocol. Please follow the above protocol when Handler-Soldier relations begin to break down, especially if the Soldier needs to be out of Cold Storage for more than four weeks, as it exceeds the number of recommended wipes. See File # 9019-752JL for further details and instructions. Look at File Dr. Blake Andrews for improved **Wiping Protocol**. Section 14-B/2._

Ухудшение качественных характеристик объекта под кодовым именем УДАЛЕНО побудило нас вернуться к протоколу доктора Брочезный. Пожалуйста, следуйте указанному протоколу, когда отношения Куратор-Солдат начинают давать сбой, особенно если Солдату требуется находиться вне криокамеры более четырех недель, так как это приводит к превышению рекомендованного количества обнулений. За подробностями и дальнейшими инструкциями обращайтесь к файлу # 9019-752JL. Усовершенствованный Протокол Обнулений ищите в файле доктора Блейка Эндрюса. Секция 14-B/2.

代号REDACTED的状况下降迫使我们重新启用了Brochezni博士的协议。当管理员-资产关系出现问题时，请遵循上述协议内容，尤其需要资产脱离冷冻仓达四周以上，洗脑次数超出建议标准的情况下。细节及进一步指令见文件#9019-752JL。改良洗脑协议见Blake Andrews博士文件。第14-B/2。

 *

Obligingly, Steve dug through the boxes, past diagrams of the brain, and medical sheets until he found the files in question. He found them tied together at the bottom of box twelve, two innocuous folders only a few sheets thick still untouched by the analyst team or the translators. They were bound together by a long piece of twine, yellow and untouched.

No one opened this since Hydra went digitized.

He cut the cord and sorted through the yellow, crumbling scraps.

*

** HANDLER-SOLDIER PROTOCOL **

Written by: Alexsander Lukin

Translated by: Anne Sharlotte Bernadette (Hail Hydra)

 

 There must be one handler, but the handler can have several subordinates. In this case, you must ensure the Soldier knows which one of you is in charge. Only the Handler can directly address the Soldier. You are the one responsible if the Soldier breaks protocol. You are the firm hand of discipline and correction.

You are not its ally, or its friend.

You are not a guardian, or a colleague.

You are the master. The whip hand. The very bridle of ~~Department X~~ **Hydra**. If you’re discipline is weak, if you’re will is soft, how can you expect the great beast on the leash to respect and obey? Make no mistake, we have given you the reigns of a great lion, a dragon of fierce might. Do not be fooled by the human appearance. It is cunning. It will pretend human emotion to deceive you.

DO NOT BE FOOLED. It is not a human. It is not your comrade. It is a weapon and will be treated as such.

 

    **Confine Soldier to Quarters**.

  *       Lower temperature to decrease mobility.
  *       Remove anything that can be used as a weapon.
  *       Remove articles of clothing: Shoes, Pants, and Shirt. If necessary, scrubs can be provided as long as the Soldier knows they are not a reward.
  *       There should be no furniture except what is necessary for Handler Operations.
  *       This exercise reminds the Soldier that it is the weapon and ~~Department X~~ **Hydra** is the mind. Human instinct must be subverted for the good of the whole.



 

**Do Not Feed the Soldier for 36 Hours.**

  *       The Soldier must earn food through its behavior.
  *       At 48 hours, the Soldier should be dehydrated enough to be malleable. If the Soldier resists, remove all personnel from the room and lower temperature.
  *       Repeat until all handlers can safely access the Soldier.



 

**Strictly Enforce Soldier Protocol.**

  *       See form B.



 

**Follow Procedure for Handler Operations:**

  *       **In Case of Mission Failure:**



o   Confine Soldier to Quarters and follow the steps listed above. No other correction needed.

  *       **In Case of Escape**



o   Bind the Soldier and use a cane on its feet until the lesson that it’s paths belong to ~~Department X~~ **Hydra** sink in. Sleep Deprivation. Allow the fever to settle. A personal touch while correcting is best: beating, skinning, water boarding. No food, four days.

  *       **In Case of Unwarranted Aggression**



o   Make the Soldier kneel with arms held above its head for as long as necessary. When it tries to rise, apply cane to shoulders and back. No food or water. If resistance continues, use electric shock. The pain will remind it of wiping. If aggression continues, feel free to be more creative.

  *       **In Case of Questioning Mission Objectives**



o   Hold the Soldier’s head under water until it complies. Remind it that it is a weapon, and we are the handler. A weapon cannot ask questions. A weapon does what the Handler Wishes. Sleep Depravation: two days.

  *       **In Case of Disobedience**



o   In case of disobedience, the Soldier has decided to assert independent will, which must be brought back into line with the desires of ~~Department X~~ **Hydra**. In this case, the Soldier has looked at the consequences and decided the punishment is worth independent action. THE HANDLER MUST TEACH THE SOLDIER THAT ALL INDEPENDENT WILL IS FUTILE. You must teach the Soldier that its own decisions will inevitably lead to failure and pain.  Be creative. See Folder C for details.

  *       **In Case of Attachment**



o   This is the most dangerous of all protocol violations. The Soldier’s loyalty must be first to ~~Department X~~ **Hydra**. Destroy the attachment. Soldier must terminate attachment on its own. It doesn’t matter how you get there. Torturing the attachment has yielded results, but it also makes the Soldier unpredictable. Exception: see (Translator Note: This part was blacked out. Untranslatable.)

  *       **For the Basic Reminder**



o   No food or water. Keep the Soldier kneeling for 24 hours. Remind the Soldier of the pain of each punishment, but do not damage the Soldier more than mission capability.

Form B

** Soldier Protocol **

Remind the Soldier of these Throughout Handler-Soldier Training:

 

The Soldier will never look the handlers in the eye.

The Soldier will never initiate contact with the handler.

The Soldier will never speak except to repeat directives.

The Soldier will follow all commands without question or restraint.

The Soldier is not permitted to indulge emotional responses.

The Soldier will greet all handlers on his knees with hands behind its back and will remain like this until told otherwise. The Soldier will get on its knees the moment training starts: even before the handler enters the room. Non-compliance is the same as disobedience.

 

Hail Hydra.

 

*****  
**

Steve’s hand shook.

He leaned back in his chair and carefully put the pages on the table. He smoothed out the rumbled edges and rubbed a gentle thumb over the names Alexsander Lukin and Anne Sharlotte Bernedette. He wanted to dig his fingers into the spaces between letters and rip them apart like the fragile ribs already buried in the ground.

The unfairness that he couldn’t reach into the ground and kill them again stuck like a bone in his throat, a fly in the ointment of getting Bucky back.

Steve looked at the screen in front of him, his reunion playing out for the fifth time. He felt his lungs catch and release: Bucky was _here._ He was _safe._ At least, as safe as Steve could make him.

His eyes watched his friend kneel again and again. He watched himself walk into the room and throw caution aside. He watched his friend…

Steve stood up and walked closer to the screen his hands dangling lose at his sides. He watched his friend kneel. He watched him put his hands high up his back. He watched him never make eye contact. Never say a word. Never look Steve in the eye.

Maybe it was too much to assume from one measly interaction but—Steve’s instincts screamed like they did before he stepped over a landmine by an inch, before he tilted his head a little to the left and felt a bullet fly past close enough to give him a headache, before he leaped off his bike and slammed his shield into a spinning death motor.

“Sam—“ he said urgently, but Sam’s name was swallowed by the racquet. The din around him just swelled, all the experts and scientists and doctors and who the hell cared talking louder and louder as tensions rose. Steve spun and slammed his palms onto the table, so hard the table shook and cracked. “Sam!” he said again, loud and angry. Immediately the noise dropped. Steve didn’t care that everyone stared at him warily, like he might snap any moment. Sam was pushing his way through the crowd, eyes tight though his face was carefully pleasant. Steve snatched the files with one hand and yanked Sam through with the other. “Tell me if I’m just seeing things,” he begged, shoving the folder into Sam’s chest. “Tell me if you see it too.”

Sam’s hand pinned the loose sheets of paper against his chest while his dark brown eyes lingered on Steve’s face, cataloguing and checking in. Steve knew Sam wanted to get him out of here, get him someplace he could decompress and breathe. Steve trusted Sam more than he trusted the two experts with their five PhD’s and eight doctorates between the three of them. He understood, in five minutes, more than Steve’s SHIELD mandated shrink uncovered in five months.

In a glance, Sam took in the lax way Steve held his arms out from his body to grapple with anyone who came in through is blind spot, the pale sick tinge in the corner of his mouth, the way his eyes pinched at the corners; loosening when Steve had enough energy to focus on appearances, but tightening again when whatever storm blowing through is mind picked up again.

Then he ignored it.

Sam turned to the papers clutched to his chest. He picked at the stapler in the corner until it loosened its grip on the pages and spread the sheets out so he could take them in at once. Steve was big picture, and he had a memory like an elephant. Sam needed the overall view and had to be able to look back without losing his place.

He read quickly, then slowed and doubled back.

The horrifying words lifted up from the page; decades old passion seeped in horrific ideological fanaticism turned torture into procedure. Into a routine, documented, cataloged and indexed manual for newbies to follow.

Sam read the manual twice, Stark and one of his shrink friends hovering over his shoulder. When he was sure he’d committed the relevant information to memory he looked to where Steve stood watching the footage replay over and over again.

In the months Sam followed Steve around the globe blowing up hidden rebel bases like a Light Side Darth Vader, intimidating powerful officials into opening up confidential documents, and blowing national secrets wide open, Sam had gotten to know Steve really well.

Steve kicked his underwear into a corner and forgot about it. He crashed into walls when sleep deprived or overly excited, limbs flailing. He kept the bed regulation straight and lined his toothbrush, razor, comb, and toothpaste in even straight lines across the counter. He squeezed the toothpaste from the bottom and got downright persnickety when Sam squeezed it from the middle (Sam started to do it just to laugh at the way Steve’s face wrinkled as he worked his way into a snit.)

Their first major fight was because Steve kept turning the toilet paper so it went _over_ the roll rather than _under_ it. Talk about downright annoying.

He unpacked his bag in every single hotel room, even if they were only going to stay there a night. First thing he did: pants on the pants rack, seams evenly lined up. Shirts on hangers. Clean underwear in the underwear drawer. Shield beside the head of his bed on the side closest to the window.

What Sam really got a good up close look at was Steve’s absolute _gift_ for instinctual, off the cuff random acts of tactical genius.

Steve took one look at a massive mess of random data and clips old footage and created a five-step plan that netted them two Hydra bases in six days. Give him a minute he could take out a base. Give him a minute and one good man he’d take out a dozen. Give him a tactical team he could train and position how he wanted… well…

The SSR won their war the first time for a reason.

Kinda. Ignoring the whole SHEILD is Hydra thing.

Okay, they _lost_ after Captain America died in that plane crash for a reason.

However, ask Steve to explain exactly how he knew that point A would lead to point F, how point B was essential to completing objective G, how point F would help G along even if G happened first… he could sound it out, give you the layout, but so much of what Steve did was instinct that he ended up making Sam more confused and frustrated.

How do you describe Beethoven to someone who’s only heard Twinkle-Twinkle Little Star?

It wouldn’t have been a problem except Steve was also an incredibly emotional man repressed under post-Depression and WWII stoicism. He was also bullheaded, obstinate, dogged, and any other synonym for _stubborn_ you could think about. When his emotions got involved, a lot of Steve’s reasons got thrown out the window in favor of solving whatever problem he saw at the moment.

When it came to James Buchannan Barnes, Steve Rogers had a lot of emotions.

The constant refrain of _Save Bucky, Save Bucky, Save Bucky_ running through Steve’s head got them in a pretty fix a time or two, and eventually Sam started asking to check his work.

Steve started laying out the pieces in front of Sam and taught him how Steve drew his conclusions so Sam could compare it to his own mental patterns. Sam was smart. He’d been the top of his class from middle school all the way through college and military training, something that wasn’t easy when society stacked the deck against you.

He’d done two tours in Iraq.

Give him a map and he could follow it and he didn’t need an explanation to make Steve’s leaps of logic.

“Shit,” Sam said.

“What shit?” Tony asked, snatching the papers and holding them close to his nose as if that’d help him read it. “I don’t see any more shit that what we’re used to. What you guys are looking at? Hydra bad. Hydra scum.”

“Bucky thinks we’re his new handlers,” Steve said, monotone. “That’s why he hasn’t been resisting.”

Tony looked from the papers crumbled in his hands to the footage replaying yet again on the wall. “Oh,” he said. “Shit.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again VERY special thanks to [Kana_Go](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Kana_Go/pseuds/Kana_Go) for taking my google translate massacre and turning it into something good.
> 
> Possible triggers: Steve approaches and touches Bucky despite indications that Bucky is unable to consent. Touches are totally platonic and in casual areas, but Bucky is unable to resist or protest. You also have someone untrained to deal with trauma dealing with someone who's traumatized and who is expecting violence to be done to them. Steve either does not notice or pushes past Bucky's warning signs. 
> 
> There is also a section that explains in detail the ways Department X/Hydra trained and treated the Winter Soldier that includes graphic description of torture and dehumanizing language. Please read carefully. If you want to skip it scroll down from the *** to the next ***
> 
> I'm in the process of moving back to the States so this chapter is very roughly edited. Feel free to tell me if you notice any discrepancies, typos, or odd logic. 
> 
> As always, if you enjoyed please let me know via Kudos or Comments. I am overwhelmed by the response this story is getting and so, so gratefully to every one of you. I love hearing what you guys think.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something needed to change. Something had to give. Something needed to break.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so sorry. This is late and very roughly edited. I've been really, really sick these last two weeks (so sick I even missed my birthday!) and didn't have the energy or mental capacity to write and edit. I also apologize for the late comment replies. This chapter is a LOT rough and IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE when I have enough energy, but I figured a roughly written chapter was better than no chapter at all. I ask for grace and patience. Thank you.

Hope is a thing with feathers

That perches in the soul

That sings a tune without words

And never stops at all.

\-- _Emily Dickenson_

 

Something needed to change.

The pouch with the bears lay on the pillow next to his head. Barnes untangled a hand from the soft blanket covering him to pull it closer. All the bears were present and accounted for, even Captain Yellow Bear. Barnes lined them up by rank and file so he could see them without lifting his head from the pillow. He felt warm both inside and out. He let himself float on the waves of the emotion without trying to identify or categorize it.

His Handler, Captain Rogers, gave him food without demanding anything in return. That was odd. His Handler, Captain Rogers, let him sleep on the bed. This was unprecedented. His handler brought him warm socks and water and soup and two big sweaters with sleeves that dropped over his fingers. His Handler, Steve, touched him and it didn’t hurt. That was…indefinable. No data.

Something had to give.

Barnes rubbed his eye to clear the fog.

He was beginning to succumb, beginning to feel safe, beginning to…

Barnes needed to push them. He needed them to stop pretending, stop treating him like a privileged asset and begin re-indoctrination. If it was going to happen he wanted it to be over and done with before he started to believe that…

He reached out to rub Captain Yellow Bear between the ears. He wanted to talk to the bear but the camera perched in the corner recorded everything he said or did. He scowled up at it from over the corner of his pillow. Pulling the soft blanket over his head, Bucky drew the gummy bear closer so he could pretend to whisper in Captain Yellow Bears ear.

If he could say something, he’d tell Captain Yellow Bear he didn’t understand, but his chest felt warm and tight. He’d tell him he felt nervous, anticipation, and… hope? Was this heavy weight called hope? It felt fragile and terrifying. He’d tell Captain Yellow Bear about his jaw locking down when the Handler – Captain Rogers – entered the room, years of training and programming overcoming the fledgling desire for autonomy. He would tell Captain Yellow Bear how if Captain Rogers hadn’t become a handler he’d’ve said, “I’m sorry I hurt you.”

He wanted to ask him, “Why do I remember your voice more than my father’s name?” but he didn’t ask handlers questions.

If his jaw would unlock when Captain Rogers reached out to touch him he’d beg, “Please treat me like a person. I want to be. I’m trying. Please. Please, give me more time.” And even though it violated protocol he wanted to say, “Don’t hurt me,” just to see if Captain Rogers acted the same as his other Handlers. He wanted to say, “I’m not… I’m not him. Not yet. I don’t even know if I want to be, but I want to be a person, so promise me you’ll wait for me to catch up. I can do it.”

All these thoughts gathered and circled in Barnes’s brain like crows over a battlefield and churned bitter acid in his stomach.

Disappointment, he realized. This was what disappointment felt like.

Something needed to break.

-*-

Barnes sat up and tugged the blanket so it draped over the edge of the cot. He sat for a moment, but when no one came in he gathered the gummy bears and ducked under the bed where the cameras couldn’t follow him. The ground under the bed was cool, and the bed was tall enough he didn’t worry about bumping his head. The white blanket didn’t keep out the light as much as dull it and he had a clear view of the door from the foot of the bed. He arranged the bears in a half circle in front of himself and settled in to wait.

On average, it took his handlers twelve minutes to return him to observational range during reprogramming. The Soldier was too unstable to leave on his own without supervision. If the pattern held, Barnes had seven minutes and seventeen seconds before the door opened and someone drug him out.

In the mean time, he decided to take advantage of the limited freedom he had to debrief the troops. “Green group,” he whispered, so quietly he barely heard his own voice. “You’re mission is to keep an eye on the fort. I want sentries at their post at all times. Two shifts, twelve hours each. Red group – I know you’re used to playing the enemy, and you’ve done admirably to train your fellow bears. However, the time has come for you to rejoin the Blue Army and help protect the camp.

“Agent Blue Bear take your troops and scout the enemy. I want to know numbers, I want to have blue prints, I want to know what their grandmother had for dinner! Purple Bear, you stay here, under the pillow with Yellow Bear.”

He arranged the bears along the edge of the blanket, behind the corners of the legs of the cot and along the back wall. He hid Purple Bear and Captain Yellow Bear in the folds of his scrubs. He had two minutes and five seconds before the handler came. He palmed Agent Blue Bear and settled in. He folded his arms and rested his chin on his wrists. One minute and forty-nine. One minute thirty. Twenty-nine seconds.

Barnes lifted his head and focused on the door. Seconds ticked on until the skin between his shoulder blades itched. Barnes ignored it and kept his eyes locked on the sliver of outline. Seconds trickled into a minute, and then two. Then three. Four sets of fifteen minutes. Still no one came to check on him. Eventually, he dropped his chin back onto his wrists and frowned.

Just when he began to think no one was coming, the door lost shape and dissolved onto the floor like a spilled a canister of salt. Captain Rogers stepped through slowly and looked around. Barnes breathed in nice and slow against the sharp pain under his ribs but admirably resisted the urge to curl in on his soft underbelly and press against the wall. Such futile actions only displayed vulnerable soft spots to… to the enemy.

Enemy?

Captain Rogers stepped cautiously into the room. He carried a large rectangular notebook under his arm, a pencil stuck above his ear. “Hey Buck,” Captain Rogers said as he slid down the wall beside the door to sit on the floor. The white non-sand gathered in reverse until the door disappeared. “Tony said you vanished from the monitors. They kind of what me to talk you out from under there, but I figure I wouldn’t want to be observed all the time either. I thought maybe I’d just keep you company. I got my sketchpad,” he lifted the notebook. “So I can sit here as long as you want. Or… just say the word and I’ll leave.”

Captain Rogers sat, head cocked as if waiting for a response, then shrugged and flipped the cover open. It was yellow with a picture of a run down house across the front. Bucky watched as the Captain drew quick lines followed by long, sinuous curves. His pencil moved rapidly over some corners, and then slowed to a snails pace as his brow furrowed in thought. Occasionally, the handler held the paper out at arms length as he chewed on the end of his pencil, eyes narrowed.

It felt familiar. Barnes couldn’t recall a particular memory except the vague impression of a couch arm under his head, a patch of sunlight brightening the colors of the kitchen curtains. A slender man, hazy and out of focus, sat with his back to the wall. The _scritch_ of pencil on paper in the past blended with the scratch of graphite across the room. Barnes crawled forward on his belly until he could see a little better. He saw Captain Rogers’s blue eyes flicker over to him, but when Barnes stilled the captain focused on the detail of his drawing.

Time trickled on; another set of fifteen minutes passed but Captain Rogers never tried to drag Barnes out. He didn’t even cajole or threaten him. As a test, the results were confusing.

He hated this. When he’d lived in his cave he’d taken care of himself. He learned how to keep himself clean, how to hunt and store food for the winter. He was competent and in control but put him two days in a white cell and he felt like a child: lost and scared, confused and broken. He didn’t feel broken when he walked his trap line, or when he sharpened a straight branch into a sharp spear for fishing. He didn’t feel broken on his mattress of furs, or on the cliff side with his cheek pressed against the rifle butt.

When he pictured his reunion with the man on the bridge he hadn’t expected champaign and fireworks but he didn’t imagine becoming a prisoner either. He had hoped the man would look at him the same way he had before: eyes wide with recognition, and… and something else Barnes couldn’t define, except it looked the way he felt when the winter in the mountains finally passed and the first wildflowers poked through the snow. He thought the man who let himself fall would fight for Barnes’s freedom not… not this.

Sure, he told himself to be ready for Captain Rogers to not recognize his personhood. Maybe Captain Rogers saw through all the Soldier’s wishful thinking and knew he wasn’t a Barnes. He wasn’t a person yet. But even though he told himself that, and told Captain Yellow Bear, he’d hoped that… that…

He’d hoped.

To his aggravation he felt his eyes and nose start burning.

He quickly drew back under the cover of the bed to hide the trickle of water leaking from his eyes. Barnes clamped his skin hand around his nose and mouth to stifle the catch and quiver of his breath.

He curled in, his fears of displaying his soft underbelly dwarfed by the mortification of tears. There was no greater display of limitation and instability. A sound must have escaped, because the _scritch_ of Captain Rogers’s pencil slowed and eventually stopped. Barnes felt like a child hiding from the dark.

The Captain’s clothes rustled and he heard him put the book and pencil. Barnes tracked his footsteps, slow and quiet, until the Captain was a few feet from the foot of the bed. He slid back to the floor next to the bed. “Bucky,” the Captain said softly. His voice shook like he wanted to say something but he fell quiet instead.

Barnes tightened his grip across his jaw but his chest heaved for air. Eventually, his lungs gave out and he drew a shuddering breath. Like a boulder, the gasp crushed through his wall and shattered his defenses. Tears leaked faster. Now released, Barnes couldn’t catch his breath. Every inhale shuddered, every exhale choked on a gasp and sob. Barnes desperately tried to call up the stoicism of the Soldier, or the emptiness of the Asset but it wouldn’t work.

Simply put, the Asset never felt disappointment before because disappointment implied hope. It felt fear when the handlers punished it, and anger when someone messed up the mission, and frustration when no one listened, but hope was an immaterial concept. Now that the Soldier experienced hope it had no idea how to squash it and bury it so it didn’t hurt so much.

The Soldier knew hope, but not for itself. It didn’t know how to hope for forgiveness, for restoration, or for kindness. It hoped for an ideal – for the mission, for the Soviet Union, for honor. It knew disappointment, but not the personal aching hollowness of bitter longing.

Barnes had hope beaten out of him. Barnes used to hope: for rescue, for death, for absolution. He learned hope turned to poison when it dried into dust. After they broke him, he never hoped for himself again.

From the gap between the bed and the ground, Barnes watched Captain Rogers’s fingers twist into knots. “Bucky,” the Captain said quietly. “It’s okay.” Again, just as calm and gentle. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

Just that. It’s okay, it’s okay.

The words were simple, innocuous, and utterly ridiculous. What was okay? What about this situation could _possibly_ be okay? Barnes was hiding under the bed, for cryin’ out loud. Barnes wasn’t a person, wasn’t free. Captain Rogers was his handler. He was showing _emotion_ to his _handler._ Hydra was probably still tracking him. He felt cold and empty and hollow and flushed and his eyes were gritty and his nose was stuffed.

Nothing about this was _okay_.

But as Captain Rogers repeated the mantra, his voice warm, honest, and gentle, Barnes felt them sink in through his skin into his sinews and bones. His muscles loosened from where they’d drawn up and gradually his tears slowed. His breathing hitched, but now his tears ran from numb exhaustion. The words flowed over him, a soothing background noise, their meaning inconsequential compared to Captain Rogers’s tone.

Captain Rogers was telling a story now: some small mission he and his team went on last year took them to India. “The smells,” Captain Rogers said. “That’s what I remember best. I mean, it wasn’t all great. Rivers stank, lots of people packed in a relatively little place, it was so hot everyone was sweaty and smelled to high heaven. At lunchtime, though, it smelled wonderful. Curry, rice, some kind of vegetarian food. I think you’d’ve liked it if I could’ve convinced you to take a bite.

“Lot of people dressed in bright colors: robin’s egg blue, topaz yellow, jade and emerald green. The women wore their hair long down their backs – straight, black. One woman had hair all the way down to her feet.

“We got to see a wedding progression. Not up close, mostly I watched through the sniper sight, but it was beautiful.”

He went on to describe the wedding: how the bride and groom rode in on a huge processional, how they sat separated by a sheer cloth while old men stood and recited something Captain Rogers couldn’t hear. He described the moment the bride and groom showered each other with rice and lit a fire in the middle of the canopy.

“They circled it four times, which must’ve been the big deal thing, ‘cause everyone started cheering after that. Then there was a lot of dancing. A _lot_ of dancing. But it was nothing like Swing, or the Jitterbug. Just as lively though. The women and men wore all kinds of colorful clothes, and the women had their midrifts bared. Even the mothers! Agent Achari said in India, the midriff isn’t really as… uh… you know. She said it was more important for women to keep their legs and chest covered.

“We were there for about a month, month and a half. By the end of it, almost all of us turned in our Kevlar and jeans for some of the lighter fabrics from the region. I mean, don’t get me wrong – a lot of the people wore what Achari called ‘Western Clothing.’ Jeans, t-shirts, skirts, tennis shoes. But I’ve still got my Kurta in my closet for hot days.”

The captain stopped and cleared his throat. He’d begun doing that over the course of his one-sided dialogue. Barnes thought back over the last few topics and realized the Captain had been talking for over an hour. “Agent Achari brought us all these movies from the Indian cinema. You know how we got Hollywood? When in India they’ve got _Bollywood._ I think you’d get a kick out of them films, Buck. Lots of singing. And dancing. And crying. Lot’s of happy endings. Lots of _sad_ endings, Mary and Joseph. There was this one movie… three? Four hours long? And I swear to God, the last _hour_ was one man dying in bed singing goodbye to his family.” His voice broke and he stopped to clear his throat.

Barnes’s head lifted from the ground, ears tuned to the hoarse rasp of Captain Rogers’s dry throat. Oblivious, Captain Rogers kept speaking. “So, one movie. Got this actor… Hrithrik something and such. We saw a _lot_ of movies with him – I think Achari was a little more interested in him than the storyline, tell you the truth, but anyway… so, the movie’s called _Dhoom_ 2– Doom spelled with an H—“ the captain’s voice cracked. “And it’s quite the ride! It’s about this thief named Mr. A who decides to steal the…”

Barnes crawled closer to the edge of the bed, the Captain’s words a hum in the background, until he could see the Captain’s face from under the edge of the cot. The Captain’s head was tilted back against the wall so he was looking at the ceiling. He’d shifted very little since he walked over here from the door and the curve of his back looked downright uncomfortable. Barnes scowled at him.

If even a smidgen of his memories were true then Captain Rogers still didn’t know how to take care of himself. It wasn’t the Soldier’s place to poke handlers into self-maintenance – generally they did that just fine on their own – but Captain Rogers _clearly_ needed some help. Barnes crept a little closer.

His programming said never to talk directly to a handler. He could brief his strike team, inform maintenance crews of faulty mechanics, even answer the direct questions of his superiors, but handlers had one job – to make certain the Soldier knew its place. They gave orders and punished failure. They rewarded success. They annihilated disobedience.

Now, lying under a cot in a big white room with a blanket blocking the cameras, Barnes grit his teeth and tried to break all of them at once. He wanted to say, “Stop talking,” but his teeth ground tighter and tighter the more his lips pulled open around his teeth until his face froze in a rictus of a anger. He let the words fall back into the emptiness of his mind and felt his face smooth out.

Reaching out felt too vulnerable.

Okay then, Barnes thought to himself. How to get someone’s attention without breaking the rules. He reached over and picked up on of the blue bears from where they sat waiting for scouting duty. Agent Blue Bear sat bravely in the palm of his hand as she waited for her mission.

He liked Agent Blue Bear a lot; even though she was cold and cruel to the weaker links of the unit she followed orders and got the job done. If the mission went badly, Captain Rogers might take her away for good, but Barnes knew Agent Blue Bear would never forgive him if he compromised a mission because he was worried about her.

Barnes carefully lined up the shot.

He ricocheted Agent Blue Bear off the wall. She bounced beautifully, a clear short rebound that sent her hurling up from under the cot and straight at Captain Rogers’s temple. Captain Rogers’s hoarse recounting of his adventures with Indian cinema cut off abruptly as Agent Blue Bear bounced off his forehead and dropped into his lap.

Captain Rogers’s head snapped toward the bed, eyes locking on Barnes like a cat on a cockroach. Immediately, Barnes snapped his eyes slightly to the right and down, his fingers curled around a secondary scout. He had full faith in Agent Blue Bear’s chances of successfully completing her mission, but backup was never amiss. Agent Blue _Berra_ was a clumsy bear, as evidenced by his lack of a left foot, but he got the job done.

When a few seconds past without response, Barnes dared to look up.

Captain Rogers lay on his stomach at the opening, cheek propped on his folded hands, blue eyes sharp and keen and focused unerringly on Barnes. Barnes jolted and hit his head on the planks of the cot. The thump echoed in the empty room, accompanied by a small huff of amusement from Captain Rogers.

Barnes watched him warily, fingers curling and uncurling around Agent Blue Berra. The Captain smiled, soft and gentle. His hand moved toward Barnes, whose muscles tightened and locked – _the Soldier does not reject chastisement and retribution –_ and opened his fist to drop Agent Blue Bear safe and sound next to the Red Troops. Barnes reached for her before he could stop himself and scooped her close to examine her for damage. Her head was a little squished, but the gelatin was already regaining its shape. Barnes looked cautiously from her to Captain Rogers.

Captain Rogers seemed content to lie there, waiting.

He waited until Barnes returned Agent Blue Bear to her comrades – all of them gathering around to offer congratulations – to rasp, “Everything alright, Buck?” Immediately Captain Rogers winced, a hand flying to his throat. “Geez,” he croaked “I think I talked myself hoarse.”

Barnes leveled him a look of smug reproof before he realized what he was doing and ducked his head; Captain Rogers looked back with emergent delight. “Bucky!” he rasped excitedly; He probably would have continued babbling on (Barnes didn’t remember the captain speaking so damn much) but immediately his throat seized. The captain dissolved into a coughing fit. Barnes rolled his eyes and flicked Agent Bear Berra at him. Agent Bear Berra’s aimed true and hit the Captain above the left eyebrow and rolled to halt next to Captain Yellow Bear.

Captain Rogers opened his mouth to say something but quickly snapped it shut when Barnes lined Agent Blue Bear up for another run.

He grinned widely at Barnes, but seemed content to sit resting with his chin on his folded arms. Barnes thought he looked stupid and tried to tell him so but though his mouth finally opened his voice box seized. Captain Rogers watched him intently as Barnes tried to form vowels and consonants. At first he practically hummed in anticipation, but when Barnes struggle continued his excitement dimmed into concern. He hummed a little – just enough for Barnes’ attention to snap back to him – and smiled gently.

Barnes heard the message as clearly as if he shouted. _It’s okay. It’s okay._ Barnes scowled down at his clenched fists, the silver and flesh overlapping as he squeezed his fingers together. He wanted to yell, _“It’s not okay. It’s not. Stop saying that it is,”_ just as much as he wanted to beg, say “ _Please. Please. Please.”_ Please don’t hurt me. Please don’t turn me back into _him,_ any of _him._ Please tell me it’s okay one more time.

A palm and five fingers crept into his line of sight.

Barnes looked up. Captain Rogers lay, one arm cradling his head, the other casually outstretched toward Barnes, palm upward. He looked from Barnes to his palm, and casually looked away. Barnes wanted to scoff – that was the _least_ covert deflection ever – but his attention was fixed on the hand in front of him. His eyes traced the three lines dividing the palm into parts, the arch that separated the fingers from the palm, and the webbing in the gaps between fingers.

He looked from the hand to Captain Rogers, who looked back calmly, and back to the hand.

Slowly he reached out toward the longest of the fingers, but his eyes caught on his metal digits. He flinched and drew back. Immediately, Captain Rogers began humming. Barnes scowled at him – humming was just as bad for his throat – and froze when Captain Rogers reached out and touched the metal hand gently on the wrist with a single finger.

The single point of warmth radiated up through the artificial nerves and shivered down Barnes’s spine. The Handler initiated contact. Barnes’s hand turned over and clung to Captain Rogers’s fingers like a lifeline. Captain Rogers gasped and wrapped his fingers around Barnes’s in a vice grip.

Barnes’s skin and bone hand skittered across the tile, flexing around an imaginary grip. Captain Rogers stretched out his other hand toward Barnes and cupped a big warm palm across Barnes’s cheek and ear. Barnes’s skin hand flew up to grab his wrist, half to tear the hand away and half to press it closer. His eyes closed as Captain Rogers ran a thumb over the dried tear tracks.

“It’s okay,” Captain Rogers whispered, his thumb swiping across Barnes’ cheek back and forth, back and forth. “It’s okay.”

_*_

Eventually, Captain Rogers pulled his hands and folded them under his chin. His efforts dragged his head and shoulders under the bed, though the width of his shoulders forced him to pull them up and in tightly. Someone outside must have become concerned, because soon after Barnes heard the door crumble and someone step over the crushed sand. “Rogers,” said a woman briskly. “This is a check in.”

Captain Rogers’s face furrowed. “I’m fine,” he croaked. Then, with a glance at Barnes, “Though I think we could both use some water. Maybe some soup.” He quirked an eyebrow in question and Barnes nodded vigorously in return. Soup would help the Captain’s throat a lot. The woman hesitated but when Captain Rogers lifted the corner of the blanket and glared at her she turned and left. Barnes peeked out to watch her.

She was the woman from the Atrium. “That’s Hill,” Captain America rasped, following his gaze. “She works for Stark Security and yada yada. She’s sorry she shot you, by the way.”

Barnes looked at him. Captain Rogers grinned unrepentantly and shrugged as much as he could in the tight space. “Okay, no she’s not, but she’s sorry her men had sticky trigger fingers. We’re not really sure why you showed up so she’s just being careful.” Barnes looked away. He picked up Captain Yellow Bear to do something with his hands. Captain Rogers watched him until the woman returned with a tray with a jug of water and two bowls of soup.

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Rogers,” she said sliding the tray toward the bed. Captain Rogers pulled the tray under the covers and didn’t reply. The first thing he did is pull a sip of water from the jug. Next he ate a spoonful from each bowl. He pointed at the two empty cups and the soup and said, “I sip, you choose.”

Barnes chose the cup closest to Captain Rogers and the bowl in front of himself. Immediately, Captain Rogers poured himself a full cup of water and downed it in one long swallow. Captain Rogers sighed in relief, his head dropping forward. “Okay,” he said, voice wet. “Are you going to introduce me?”

Barnes cocked his head. Captain Rogers pointed at the ranks of Gummy Bears lined up in position around the cot. “I’d love to meet your friends, Buck, if you want to introduce me.” Barnes’s eyes narrowed. Captain Rogers was sharper than he thought and he didn’t know if that was beneficial. He peered at him closely but Rogers returned his searching gaze with a calm and honest stare.

Barnes looked at his Gummy Bear troops. He wasn’t stupid. He knew they weren’t sentient. They couldn’t protect him. But they’d been his ungrudging, unjudging companions for months. He felt possessive over their names. He knew more than anyone how important names could be. However, his handler had asked him a question, and even though it was unprecedented, Barnes was dying to talk to him even over something as silly as his toys.

He lined them up and focused intently on their little paws. “T-these are the Red Troops,” Barnes stammered. “They… They don’t really have names yet except for this one.” He held up the Red Bear with a green string tied around its neck. “This is Commander Red. He leads them in the skirmishes against the Blue Group. They play the enemy most of the time because they’re good at it.” He peeked at the Captain, but Captain Rogers just nodded solemnly and listened as carefully as if Barnes was delivering a field report.

Barnes’s confidence grew.

“Red army’s clever, but they usually hole up in their bases, wait for the enemy to come to them. They used to have some bouncy ball tanks, but I had to leave them behind when… when…” he cleared his throat against the restriction and kept going. “They’re smart, but they depend on their numbers too much.”

He waited for Captain Rogers to nod before continuing on. He lined the green bears and introduced them. “These are the green troops. They’re sentries, grunts…pretty much anything that’s needed. They’re on sentry duty right now.”

“No names?” Captain Rogers said.

Barnes carefully lined them up again. “Their names are kind of long,” he cautioned, playing with Private Green Bear.

Private Green Bear didn’t have any distinctive marks, hence his rank. Corporal One Ear had one ear while Corporal Grump had gotten into a fight with a wild rat and lost half his body. Sergeants Bramble and Tumble were twins, each one with a red string tied around their necks for distinguished acts of bravery. “And these are Lieutenant Blank, and Lieutenant Jake of the Rose. Don’t laugh,” Barnes scolded Captain Rogers when he ducked to hide a smile. “He’s very embarrassed, but I’m assured his battle for the local rose bush will be told for generations.”

When Rogers grinned, Barnes ducked his head to hide the pleased dusting of red across his cheeks.

It got easier to talk the longer he chattered on. He tried to keep the presentation of the troops factual and on topic, but funny anecdotes and quips kept working their way in. Barnes figured the James Buchanan Barnes part of him liked the way Captain Rogers smiled. He returned his green bears to sentry duty and lined up the Blue Bears. “These are the agents. Agent Blue Bear is the head agent, and kind of in charge of the army. She’s fierce and brave. Agent Blue Berra’s her second. He’s brave too, but kind of a lunkhead. Then there’s Agents Scout and Collar.” Scouts had green spots after the dive in the river, and Collar had a yellow string around his neck.

“Agent Blue Bear’s female,” Captain Rogers observed. . “I had a female agent attached to my unit back in 1945. Agent Peggy Carter.” He ducked his head to try and meet Barnes’ eyes, but Barnes focused on the empty gap of Agent Blue Bear’s ear. Eventually Barnes glanced up at him and shrugged.

Captain Rogers gave up. He looked at Captain Yellow Bear and Bear Soldier. “So, what are their names?”

Barnes turned beet red.

It started at his ears and spread across his forehead and nose and down his cheeks, down his neck and down his collar. Captain Rogers stared wide eyes. “What on… what on earth did you name them?” He crawled closer and peered at the two innocuous bears tucked into the folds of Barnes’s scrubs.

Barnes grabbed his soup instead of answering and slurped it loudly. Captain Rogers grinned at him, “C’mon, Buck. Now I’m curious. I promise I won’t laugh. Cross my heart, swear to die, stick a needle in my—“ Barnes growled and Captain Rogers drew back, hands up. “Okay. No needles. No needles.” He said it over and over, gentle and soft until Barnes returned to his bowl. Then he inched forward and whispered, “But tell me. Pleease?”

Captain Rogers was impossible: an insatiable child. Idiot.

He flushed darkly but pulled out the yellow bear and the purple bear. “T-this is…” his stutter had returned. Barnes took a breath and tried again. “T-th-this…” Frustrated he dug a metal knuckle into his temple. Captain Rogers’s smile faded and he leaned in closer, a little wrinkle forming between his eyebrows.

“It’s okay,” he said, the mantra a familiar refrain. “It’s okay. You don’t have to say anything you don’t want to, Buck.” His hand reached out, pulled the metal hand down, and placed his hand over it to keep it pinned against the tile. “It’s okay.” Barnes could easily yank his hand free but he liked the steady warmth of Captain Rogers palm across his. He felt… human… when Captain Rogers treated him like one. The touch gave him the courage to plant a finger between Captain Yellow Bear’s ears. “T-this is Captain Yellow Bear.” He refused to look up at Captain Rogers’s indrawn breath. “He protects me. And… and this is Soldier Bear. He’s… he’s…”

He made the mistake of looking up. Captain Rogers stared at him pale and wide-eyed.

Barnes’s throat closed. Captain Rogers looked horrified. Appalled. His mouth gaped around empty air before he gave up and pulled his arms back into the protection of his body. His handler was displeased.

He was…He was…he failed.

He Failed. Failure was not acceptable. He was…He was…

-*-

Steve watched horrified as his best friend shut down. Everything had been going so well. Bucky had been meeting his eyes, talking, albeit hesitantly and slowly, and even smiling. Then, like the sudden snap of the safety line, his face smoothed out and his eyes jumped to the spot just left of Steve’s eyes. Something of the roiling mess of emotions trapped in Steve’s ribcage must have broken through.

“Bucky,” he said, trying to draw his friend out again. “Bucky, it’s okay. I’m not angry, or upset or… or disappointed. Bucky!” He hated the constrictions of the cot. He hated the barriers of the legs, of the bed boards and wall that kept him from reaching his friend and curling around him. He wanted to pick up the cot and throw it across the room but he didn’t need Sam in his ear to tell him that was a bad idea. This cot with the blanket draped over the corner was the first space Barnes claimed for himself.

Steve carefully pushed the gummy bears aside until he could wiggle farther under the cot and reach his friend. His fingers brushed the back of Bucky’s neck and his friend flinched. Steve jerked his hand back as if burned. “Oh God,” he prayed. “Bucky, you’re safe. I swear to God you’re safe. It’s okay. It’s okay.” His voice stretched too tight for the calm mantra and since it wasn’t helping Bucky _at all_ he abandoned it.

“I’m so proud of you, Buck,” he told his friend instead. “When Sam and I started looking for you we didn’t know what we’d find. I never expected you to come to us, all clean cut and dressed to impress, or for you to be so creative. It’s incredible, Buck. I know you’re not okay right now, but it’s okay that you’re not. I’ll carry you from now on, if you let me, until you can walk on your own. God, Buck, there’s so much to see, and do.

“ _The Hobbit_ has a sequel now. Well… more like three sequels. There are movies, even. You’re going to love Frodo. And Pippin. And, well, you might not like Gandalf but you’re going to love the stuffin’ out of Eowyn. Wait ‘til you see _Finding Wonderland_ , or the new Disney movies. I promise you, Bucky, we are going to get through this. You’re going to be okay.” He swallowed back the tears rising to choke him and scrambled for the gummy bears.

“Look, Buck,” he said, arranging the bears in a circle around his friend. “Your bears are on duty. The green troops are on watch, the red and blue are guarding you, and you’ve got Captain Yellow Bear and…and Soldier Bear in there with you.”

Soldier Bear.

He hated the name. The moment Bucky named it he felt like picking it up and throwing it down the toilet or grinding it into dust. He wanted to scream and rage that the one object Bucky picked to embody himself carried a title of a tool, a faceless weapon to be used and put away.

But that wasn’t what Bucky needed, clearly.

Steve forced it from his mind in favor of the steady stream of nonsense until eventually, gradually, and too damn slowly it sank in. Bucky’s muscles loosened, a single blue eye peeking out at Steve from the corner of his eye. Steve smiled at him, wobbly but genuine. “Hey Buck,” he said gently. “Welcome back.”

Bucky’s eyes darted away and Steve’s stomach dropped to the level of his knees. All his progress gone because of one misplaced look.

He wanted to kick himself but instead focused on turning this into something good. Clearly, Bucky wasn’t ready to handle negative emotions yet. “I’m sorry, Bucky,” he said to the mass of quivering best friend. “I’m proud of you, and I’m sorry for whatever you saw on my face. I’m not horrified by you, or disgusted, or angry. I’m proud of how creative you are. I loved hearing about your bears.

“I’m not going to hurt you, or recalibrate you, or anything that you’re imaging. You’re my friend. I…” What could he possibly say? I promise? I won’t hurt you? How could Bucky possibly understand that, and even if he did how could he believe him? Steve thought back on all the babble he’d spouted and wanted to kick himself.

He remembered Bucky’s father.

Bucky’s father was a Sunday drunk. Most of the neighborhood drunkards had no self control, drinking day in and day out, but not George Barnes. From Monday to Saturday he was the nicest, most hardworking man in the neighborhood. Got up every morning bright and early to helped get the kids to school. He went to work, came home, helped Bucky and his sisters with their homework. Kissed his wife, went to bed, and got up to do the same thing all over again.

Until Sunday.

On Sunday, George Barnes got up early, went to the nearest bar, and drank liquor from the moment the bar opened until the hour they kicked him out. He’d walk past their home, an arm slung around the shoulder of one of the women who rotated through the bar, right past his wife and their four children. It wasn’t revenge, or spite. He simply didn’t care.

When the last bar closed, George Barnes came home roaring drunk. He threw things, cursed his wife, and cursed his kids. He inevitably threw them out of the house, locked the door behind them, and collapsed in bed.

Bucky and his family walked round and round the house until they were sure their father was asleep. Then, his mom and sisters hoisted Bucky up to the kitchen window they’d rigged earlier in the day so it wouldn’t lock. Their dad probably didn’t even know it opened. Bucky slipped through the window and crept down the stairs, crawling on his belly in front of his parents bedroom to keep the wood floors from creaking until he could unlock the front door and let his family in.

On Monday morning, George Barnes woke up like nothing was wrong.

He never asked how his wife and kids got back in the house. He didn’t ask about the bruises, or offer an explanation for his behavior. He braided the girls’ long hair so they’d look pretty at school. He helped them with last minute homework. He helped his wife make breakfast. He went to work. He came home. He kissed his wife and went to bed. Over, and over again, the perfect father.

Until Sunday.

Bucky hated him. He hated him, and he loved him, and he never trusted him.

Even though George Barnes was the perfect father six days a week Sunday was always coming and Bucky always remembered Sunday. When Bucky was seventeen his father joined his mother in church. The drinking slowed and eventually stopped but even after his dad was five years sober Bucky kept his door unlocked on Sunday just in case his sisters needed someplace to stay. Until the day Bucky went off to war and died he made sure his mother had a key for when, not if, his father backslid. He never trusted him.

Five years couldn’t change the fourteen years of damage done.

What’s more, Bucky began to look at all fathers the same way. He loved mothers. Mothers were tough but fair. His own mother had hard, calloused hands, and a face lined with cares and worry. She smiled little and laughed less but her hands were gentle and firm and Bucky loved her. This love spread to all the mother in the neighborhood. Bucky wouldn’t or couldn’t hear a bad word about them.

But fathers.

Fathers were liars. If a man acted like a good father he was faking. If there was a problem in the house it was because the father messed up. Fathers deceived helpless women, trapped them in their homes with promises of safety and then used them for their own gain. The more decent a man acted outside his home the less Bucky trusted what went on in it.

This continued right up ‘til the moment when Sally Beth Gingham walked up to their front door, rang the bell and after Bucky answered hair mussed from sleep with lines from the pillow pressed into his face burst into tears. She’d missed her monthlies and Bucky was the only man she’d lain with.

This was 1940. Bucky was twenty-two years old. In 1940, it wasn’t unheard of for young women to become pregnant out of wedlock, but it wasn’t anything like the modern world. Men didn’t brag about their conquests and women who slept around weren’t attractive, just loose. Becoming pregnant at eighteen, unmarried, to an Irish boy from a different denomination was enough to destroy Sally’s reputation completely.

She hadn’t even told her parents, scared as she was that her father would throw her out of the house. Even if he didn’t her family’s name and stature was ruined forever. Her mother would be whispered about in the isles of the food market, or looked sideways in the isles of the church. Her father would walk with head bowed at work. Her brothers and sisters would lose their chances at marrying well.

As for Bucky, he’d never imagined himself as a father; fathers were the scum that preyed upon their own families and here he was about to be one. Steve sat Sally down on the couch and tucked a blanket around her lap while Bucky paced back and forth from the window to the kitchen and back.

This was before easy pregnancy tests. Before a girl could walk into a doctors office for an anonymous, silent appointment. Before abortion clinics. If Sally was truly pregnant Bucky had to marry her. If Sally was truly pregnant then Bucky was going to be a father.

Sally eventually cried herself to sleep on the sofa, the coverlet pulled up to her shoulders, blonde ringlets crushed into the arm of the couch. In her haste and fervor she hadn’t put on the slash of red lipstick she always wore or worked the careful stokes of black into her eyelashes. While she slept Steve stood next to Bucky shoulder pressed against his and watched the smoke curl from the factories in the distance.

“I don’t know if I can do this, Stevie,” Bucky said, voice cracked. He wasn’t talking about marrying Sally, or taking care of her. Bucky was always a caregiver, willing to give and give and give until he was empty. “What if I’m just like _him_?”

“You’re not,” Steve said, gently. “You have a choice, every day of every week of every year, of who you’re going to be. You’re not your father, Bucky, as long as you chose not to be.”

Bucky laughed wetly and brushed away moisture Steve wouldn’t acknowledge. “And what if I’m not strong enough?”

Steve shrugged. “Then I’ll knock some sense into you. Fact is, Buck, your dad was just plain stupid. He convinced himself that as along as he was the perfect husband the rest of the time, giving in to cruelty and selfishness once a week was okay. You’re plenty selfish. You hog the blankets, and you do things you know you shouldn’t,” he pointedly did _not_ look at the unmarried pregnant woman asleep on the couch. “And you’re going to make mistakes. Difference is, you know how to love someone more than yourself and that’s something your dad never learned. There’re lots of great dads, Buck. You just have to do what you’ve always done for me and you’ll do fine.”

In the end, Sally turned out not to be pregnant.

Her monthly came two weeks late and though Bucky quietly worried she’d taken care of the child herself the matter was laid to rest. Bucky was a lot more careful after that. He watched the men in the neighborhood with a wary, discerning eye, an eye more open to seeing the way Mr. Sinclair rested a hand against the small of his pregnant wife’s back, the way Mr. Guthrie watched his wife and played with the red highlights in her hair.

It was only after Bucky realized first hand that fatherhood didn’t change you into a monster, something he knew in his brain but didn’t quite believe in his heart, that he began to consider if all fathers were as dangerous as they seemed.

People had talked blue in the face trying to convince Bucky to re-evaluate the way he saw the world, but Bucky redefined stubborn and put more stock in his own personal experience than a story that might be a lie. Once he’d got an idea into his head nothing but personal experience would convince him different.

Right here in the present with Bucky curled against the wall eyes focused slightly to the left of Steve’s face all of Bucky’s experiences told him Steve was an enemy. Had anyone ever treated him kindly since he fell? Treated him gently because it was the right thing to do rather than because they wanted him to do something or become something for them?

All the talking in the world wouldn’t convince Bucky that Steve was his friend if everything _else_ was telling him Steve was just another in the line of people sent to hurt him. Steve looked around the small space, suddenly aware of how he was blocking Bucky’s exit. The room seemed gut-wrenchingly empty and sterile. The bed horrifically anonymous and interchangeable with a thousand other prison cots. What did Bucky see when he looked at Steve?

Who. _Who_ did Bucky see.

Steve dug his fingers into the corners of his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. His thoughts spun and reeled. He needed to know what Bucky was thinking but Bucky wasn’t talking.

He needed to get out of here.

Steve crawled forward until he could cup his hand around the back of Bucky’s head. “Bucky, listen to me. Now.” He let the snap of an order infuse his voice. Bucky’s eyes snapped forward, focused and hurt. Steve pushed back the sickening wave of regret; he couldn’t afford to second guess himself now. “Are you listening? Nod once for yes.”

Bucky hesitated, the lines of muscle in his neck strained. He nodded once, a jerky bob of the head.

“Good,” said Steve, and he offered a quick warm smile. “I need to go, but I _will_ be back. You can stay under the bed as long as you want, but I want you to come out twice a day to eat, relieve yourself, and sleep. Nod once if you understand.” Another nod. Steve wanted to say, _I am not your handler; I am your friend. I will not hurt you, I am trying to help you_ , but how to describe the color red to the blind, or the sound of a harp to a deaf man. Instead he pressed his forehead to Bucky’s, the last invasive touch he’d allow himself to make, and drew back. “Good job, Bucky. Good job.”

Bucky’s muscles loosened and his head fell forward. He caught himself before his forehead touched Steve’s shoulder but relief rested in the corners of his eyes.

It was harder to leave the space under the bed than crawl under it. He slid out as quickly as he could, bumping his funny bone into the bed leg and knocking his head on the springs. He practically ran to the door.

Sam met him on the other side, arms hanging slightly open, an invitation if Steve wanted it. Steve clamped a hand on Sam’s shoulder and let his friend carry his grief for a moment.

It settled into his shoulders, his scapula and clavicles, hovered between his ribs. It covered his throat like thick molasses and dried his mouth. It sank his feet into the concrete. It drained his strength through his heart and blood vessels and weakened the joints of his knees and fingers. He shook with it though his eyes were dry.

Sam stood, steady and firm, as Steve poured his grief into the hand clamped over Sam’s shoulder. He didn’t move or mutter empty assurances but breathed deeply and evenly, a gentle rhythm for Steve’s lungs to follow. Sam led him over to a chair and pressed him down. Down until he sat, down until his shoulders bowed toward the ground, down until his head rested on his knees. “Breathe. That’s all you can do right now. Breathe. In… hold it for five. Out… hold it. In… hold it for five. Out…. It’s not your fault, Steve. In… hold for five. You found him. Out. Slower. There you go. In… We can help him. Out.”

Sam stayed kneeling beside Steve, a dark hand curled around the nape of Steve’s neck. His body blocked off the hall and created an illusion of safe space. The sweet musk of his cologne was familiar after all those days and weeks and months living in each others pockets, sharing a bathroom and the seats of small, rented cars, their clothes mixed in a pile in the corner of hotel rooms, hostels, and guest quarters.

Scent carries memory. Every person’s scent is as unique as their individual fingerprints, a mark purely _theirs_ upon the face of the earth. Scent carries taste, but more than that it carries _emotion, pleasure, well-being,_ and _safe._ Smell lingered after other memories faded.

Steve’s sharp memory didn’t let him forget anything.

Bucky smelled like sleepy mornings and freshly cut grass until the war; after the war he smelled like blood and mud and sweat and cigarette smoke but underneath it all he still smelled like clean air. His mother used to smell like daisies and warm soft sunlight. Aunt Winnie smelled like spice – cinnamon and ginger and cumin. Under his cologne, Sam smelled like butter and sugar _._ Steve breathed deep.

-*-

The feelings of _safe, friend, partner_ eventually calmed the emotional turmoil. Steve sat back and offered Sam a rueful grimace. “Sorry.”

“No problem,” Sam said. After seven non-stop months of stress and adrenaline, he figured Steve was overdue. The human mind and body could live under those conditions but it took its toll. “So… what are you going to do?”

“Go back in there. Try and get him to talk to me.”

Sam hummed. “Just a thought – ever try asking him?”

“I did ask him.”

“No, you offered him choices. I mean, legit say: “Bucky, tell me what’s going through you’re head. It’s like… okay, my dad works with refugees for his post-retirement I-gotta-do-something sort a deal. One of the first things he tells them is not to go to the big department stores. He tells them to go to gas stations, mom and pop type places. Leave Lows and the gigantic mall sized Wal-Marts for later because there’re just too many choices.

“After I came back from Iraq, I followed his advice. First place I went – dinky little corner store two blocks from my house. I swear it felt like walking into a warehouse. Anything I could think of it was there. Bread, ham, cheese. Twinkies. Toothbrushes and toothpaste.” He huffed and shook his head. “Five months later I walked back in and thought… man, this shop’s got nothing.”

Sam smiled wryly. “Choices man. Seems like it’d be instinct but…It something people need to learn over time. Usually you learn it as a toddler.” Sam crossed his arms and leaned into the wall. “You need to give him fewer choices: eat, yes or no. If there’s something we need to do differently we have to know now, before we make a wrong step and end up with a killer in a cage. For that, we need direct answers.”

The penny dropped. “You want me to walk in there and order him to talk.”

“I’m saying the only way we’re going to know how to help him is if he tells us what’s wrong.” Sam ran a hand over his face and grabbed his chin between the pointer and thumb. “It seems intuitive to give him all the choices he’s missed but all that’s doing is making him confused. Might even seem like a contradiction; he is in a _cell._ So… start small. Orders are probably really comforting right now.”

On the monitor at the end of the hall, Bucky’s cell was empty except for the hem of the blanket, which moved occasionally. There was something heartbreakingly pathetic about a world-renowned assassin hiding under the bed like it could hide him from the boogieman. In some ways the Bucky in the room was like a little kid stripped bare of the oblivion that protected children from the world.

The very idea of going in there and forcing Bucky out of his comfort zone felt wrong – so repulsive it made him sick. “There has to be a kinder way.”

“This _is_ kindness,” Sam insisted. “No one ever helped _anyone_ by codling them. That’s the worst thing you can do. Instead of encouraging someone to fight, work through their problems, all you tell them is it’s okay to run away. It seems cruel. Hell, it even feels cruel. Gentle and kind doesn’t mean letting them wallow in whatever feels messed up, even if they totally deserve to feel that way. It means providing him with a safe place to unfurl.”

Sam, the eternal story teller, hit upon another example. “Helen Keller.”

“The blind, deaf girl?” Steve repeated, taken aback. Keller was a big deal back in his own time. She was quite the socialist, suffragist, and activist. If the newspapers weren’t applauding her achievement in “overcoming her disadvantages” they were blaming her disabilities for her social views, claiming her deafness and blindness kept her ignorant of the workings of the world.

Sam nodded, getting into the groove. “She lost both her hearing and her sight to her fever. Her parents loved her a lot but they pitied her and spoiled her rotten. Her parents loved her so much they couldn’t bear to discipline her. Keller was a horrible mix of tight boundaries mixed with headless indulgence.

“So then comes Annie Sullivan; Sullivan forced Keller to do a lot of things that seemed cruel. She expected a girl with no way to communicate to learn to act like a dignified, educated young lady. Her parents rose quite the stink, claiming Sullivan was cruel in her expectations but Sullivan kept going.” Sam stopped. He looked at his friend carefully. “You get what I’m saying, right?”

“I’m not quite sure the same sentiment applies here,” Steve said stiffly. Isolation and deprivation, while horrible, wasn’t the same as years of torture, dehumanization, brainwashing and stolen agency.

Sam tucked his hands in his pockets. “People will fall to the level of your expectations, Steve.”

Steve stared at him. After a long moment of silence, he turned and walked away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The story of Barnes and his father is based on the story of a close family friend. 
> 
> Facts about scent:  
> Smell is the most sensitive of the senses. People can remember smells with 65% accuracy after a year, while visual recall is about 50% after three months.
> 
> Research has shown that smell is the sense most linked to our emotional memory. Studies show that 75% of emotions are triggered by smell which is linked to pleasure, well-being, emotion and memory. So, for example, if you grew up in a home with a smoking parent and felt safe and secure the smell of cigarette smoke will provoke emotions of safety and security. People who experience trauma associated with a smell will flash back to that trauma when they smell it. 
> 
> This is one of the reasons smell is so useful when dealing with trauma and PTSD.
> 
> 2\. Everyone has their own base smell, as unique and distinctive as your fingerprint. The base smell doesn't actually smell like identifiable things in nature (sugar, or cotton, or etc) but people layer themselves in such smells, and we often associate the base smell with the others. 
> 
> Once again, all of this chapter is subject to editing once I recover.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Steve,” Barnes said. “Do you know why I ran?”

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

\--James Baldwin

 

 

Captain Rogers returned the next day and the day after that, each time with a hot bowl of soup. Today’s was called it chicken purée. It had a gritty, watery texture, but the taste tickled his taste buds. He wished it had some rosemary and chunks like the venison stew he made in the woods. His preference felt like a delicious secret. He squirreled it away with the realization that he liked the warmth of Captain Roger’s skin against his. He treasured the rare moments when Rogers would crawl under the bed and join him in watching the door. After that time with the gummy bears, Captain Rogers never approached the bed unless Barnes made it clear he was invited.

Usually, Captain Rogers set up on the far side of the room away from the bed by the door. Sometimes he sat closer to the corner. He always brought the pad of lineless paper and pencils, or a book. Sometimes he read out loud.

After that first time, he always brought two bottles of water. One stayed by his hip so he could sip it occasionally. The other he rolled across the room until Barnes could reach it without leaving the safety of the bed.

His pencil strokes were short and brusque. The lead of his pencil broke under the pressure of his grip so he kept stopping to sharpen the lead. His breath hitched and he kept pressing his hand to his abdomen. There was a slight dilation in the blue eyes set in a ghastly-blanched face.

Barnes lay conflicted, squirming internally. Part of him wanted to go sit next to the Captain. He’d ask what was wrong, ruffle his hair to get rid of the line between his eyebrows, tell a joke. If he knew any jokes he’d tell a joke. The rest of him wanted to shake the Captain until his teeth rattled and his secrets fell onto the floor.

Were his superiors angry? Did they disapprove of how Rogers was handling him? Barnes wriggled back farther into the shadows and arranged the Gummy Bear Army between him and Rogers.

Rogers dragged a hand over his face and walked over to the edge of the bed. He sat down on the floor at the end of the bed as he did four days ago, one leg bent up to his chin the other stretched out like a blockade. It was irrational that Rogers blocking the door made Barnes feel safer but it did. Barnes felt like an insurmountable wall had been built between the harm of the world and him. He slowly crept closer until he could peer out at Captain Rogers from under the hem of the blanket.

He got caught in the blue eyes looking back. Rogers’ eyes were warm; the lines of his face softening the longer Barnes lay caught in his gaze. His hand lifted and Barnes flinched, eyes jerking to the left. Rogers’ hand dropped like a stone and laid flat against his thigh. “It’s okay, Bucky,” Rogers said. Barnes risked peeking at his face; Rogers was watching him thoughtfully. Barnes quickly looked away.

“Bucky,” Rogers said firmly. “I want you to nod if you understand me.” Barnes looked at him sideways, but nodded. It wasn’t the weirdest request by a long shot and by now Barnes was used to Rogers addressing him directly. Rogers’s thoughtful expression melted into a set jaw and thin lips. “Okay,” he breathed. “Okay. I’m going to ask you some questions. You don’t have to…” he stopped and closed his eyes. “I _want_ you to answer as best you can. Nod if you understand.”

This time Barnes nod was crisp. He felt the order settle into the small of his back, a weight grounding him. Finally, the Soldier whispered. Finally, person-like part mourned.

Rogers didn’t start the interrogation immediately; instead, he sat for a long moment eyes fixed upon his upturned palm. His fingers curled. “Last order,” he said, eyes locked onto his fingertips. “If you feel scared, or hurt, or angry say _Stop_ and I’ll leave. No matter what happens, you’re going to get dinner. No one is going to hurt you. All you have to do is say _Stop_ and I go. Nod if you understand.”

This time it took longer for Barnes to nod. He was confused, the different sets of data contradicted and conflicting. The Soldier and the Asset turned the words over and over trying to find the meaning behind the meaning.

What did stop mean in this context?

Pare, aufhören, توقف, стоп.

To come to an end. To cease happening. To cause an event to stop. A cessation of movement or operation. Cease. Desist. Terminate.

Leave.

离开, άδεια, jättää. To depart. To go away from. To allow to remain. To exit. To go without taking.

It made no logical sense. But then, nothing made sense. Maybe that was the trick.

Bucky nodded, a brisk stutter of movement barely there and gone, but Rogers was watching him carefully. “After the attack on the Helicarrier, where did you go?”

Barnes blinked. It took a moment for his unused voice to croak, “Wyoming. Near the mountains.”

“Was there a Hydra base there?”

“No,” Barnes said. “I…” wanted to hide, but wanting wasn’t allowed. Neither was hiding. Should he lie? Was this another test? He’d already taken too long to answer. Panicked he looked up at Rogers, and then realized his mistake as their eyes locked and he couldn’t look away. However Rogers didn’t frown or hit him but looked back steadily. In steady blue eyes Barnes found the courage to say, “I wanted to be free.”

It must have been the right answer because while Rogers’s face didn’t change – he was too well trained for that – his eyes lit up. “Okay,” he said, gentle and even as always. “Why did you come here?”

Why. Why. Why, why, why. To ask for what reason or purpose. A reason or explanation. On account of which.

“I…” He stopped there, stuck. I wanted to be safe? Hydra closed in. I wanted to be a person. “I knew you.” His eyes burned and he looked down. Captain Yellow Bear urged him on. “I wanted to be a person. And I knew you.”

Rogers sat silent for a long time. Just when Barnes thought the weight would crush him Captain Rogers asked, “And what does it mean to be a person?”

Barnes looked up anxiously. “I thought you’d know. That…that you’d look at me and tell me if I could be one—If I’d ever be person-like again, and how…” How to talk, how to laugh, how to be James Buchanan Barnes, how to be a son, a brother, a friend, anything other than a soldier. He didn’t know how to say it. “How,” he finished lamely.

Suddenly, in a burst of courage he didn’t know he had, “I worked hard,” he blurted out determined to prove that he _could._ He _could_ if Rogers would just give him a chance. “I figured out how to eat, and how to clean my clothes, and I practiced looking people in the eyes.” It all seemed so pathetic, the little achievements he’d worked so hard for pitiful. The weapon pretending to be a man. Barnes scrounged away for something else to add and came up blank.

Barnes flushed in shame, and his shame quickly turned to anger. It built like air in a balloon until it slipped out through his defenses like water through a broken dam. “Then you locked me up in _here,_ ” he hissed. “I thought maybe you’d turn me away, or say I wasn’t human, but I never thought you’d be _just like them_.”

Rogers rocked back like he’d been hit. His face blanched, then reddened, then turned sickly grey.

For a few heady moments Barnes felt powerful. He’d struck out and hurt him. _He_ fought back. Him. The Soldier never fought. This was pure Barnes.Then fear engulfed him. He clapped a hand over his mouth against the wave of instinctive vomit of apologies. The Soldier doesn’t beg, and even so… he’d fought back for one glorious moment. He wouldn’t ruin in with apologies even if they drove nails though his feet and hands or made him lay flat on the floor while they poured boiling water over his back.

Rogers’s hands spread his fingers across his thighs and pressed until the joints turned bone white. “Okay,” he said, voice tight but even. His eyes flickered from Barnes’s grip over his mouth to his eyes focused to the left of his face to the door. “Okay. I guess that answers my next question. What do you think we want?”

“What?” Barnes said.

Rogers repeated the question. “What do you think we want?” When Barnes stared at him, his careful mask broke, softened. “It’s okay, Bucky. If you want to stop, all you have to say is—“

“You want to take me out and put Bucky in,” Barnes said rapidly while he still could. “You want to reprogram me to be your friend but you don’t know the proper procedure.”Rogers swallowed like he’d been punched in the gut. That was two strikes Barnes managed to land. Rogers looked down blinking rapidly, his hand clenching and unfurling. “Okay,” Rogers said. “Okay.” He pushed himself to his feet. “Thanks for answering me, Bu…” he stopped, fist clenched tight. “Thank you. I’ll go get your soup now.”

He started to the door – his shoulders hunched and bent – and as Barnes watched him leave all his triumph turned to ash.

“Wait!” Barnes said, scrambling out from under the bed. Captain Rogers turned slowly like he didn’t want to face him. Barnes immediately slit to his knees at the Captain’s feet when Rogers turned fully. “Are—are you still my friend?” he asked, eyes fixed on the ground.

Immediately strong hands gripped his shoulders, pulling him to his feet and into the circle of Rogers’s arms. “Of course,” Rogers said fiercely. “Of course I am, Bu…Buddy. Never, ever doubt that.”

Barnes pressed his face into the hollow of Rogers’s neck. “Are you mad?” he whispered.

“No.” Rogers answered, hands gently cupping the back of Barnes’s head, cradling it closer to his chest. “I’m… sad that I messed up. I messed up, not you, okay? And I promise I’m going to be better.”

He pulled back until he could look Bucky in the face. When Bucky’s eyes slid to the side Rogers moved to catch them. “Buddy – you are a person. Right now, you’re a person. I promise. I don’t want to take you out and put someone else in because you’re already…you’re already _you_. I don’t need to do anything. You already did it.”

Memories of that look layered on top of Rogers, a face thinner and hollow but just as fierce. Steve never lied. Not to Bucky. Not like this. “You promise,” he said desperately. “You’ll come back?”

Rogers pulled him into a fierce hug, warm and firm and safe. “Yeah, buddy. We’re going to have a long talk later but right now I need to go see a guy about a dog. Can you stay here just a little bit longer? Just give me one hour. One hour that’s all I need.”

Barnes nodded and let Rogers untangle himself. Rogers pressed their foreheads together. “I’m with you, Buddy. I promise.” Then he was gone.

Barnes stood in the empty room hands listless at his sides. He felt hollowed out, empty. Barnes walked back and sat on the corner of his bed, counting down the seconds. He played the moments of the interrogation in his head, over and over again. His mouth formed the words, “You are a person,” and a pleased flush spread over his skin.

He also turned the words “I messed up, not you,” over and over, trying to understand their meaning. He didn’t understand the acknowledgement of error just like he didn’t know what error Rogers was talking about. If he was talking about the method of indoctrination then yes, he had messed up. But then he wouldn’t promise to come back, he wouldn’t say Barnes was a person, he wouldn’t promise absolution… he didn’t make any sense.

For the first time, Barnes allowed himself to return to the memories that drove him here in the first place. He picked through them slowly, achingly, until his head hurt and his fingers pressed bruises into his skin to the bone. He forced himself to stop thinking like a prisoner waiting for recalibration and like the man surviving in the mountains.

The room kept him from reaching the clam center where tactics and heart met. Every time he began to think like a person the blank walls forced him back. He couldn’t think. Barnes lifted his finger to his teeth and bit, hard and deep until he felt the warm rush of blood flow over his tongue. The pain brought the edges of the world into focus.

If Rogers wasn’t his handler, then Rogers was Steve. Steve was his friend. So, if Rogers who wasn’t his Handler was Steve who was his friend then Barnes wasn’t… was? Barnes was…

The logic burned.

His fingers dug into his short hair, the bristles just long enough for him to grab and twist. If Steve was his friend, then Barnes was what? What was confined but not a Soldier. What did you take care of while putting it in a cage? A pet. A criminal. Something dangerous.

What was dangerous?

An enemy.

What was a friend but also an enemy?

His scalp burned as small pieces of hair fell from between his fingers onto the bed. The seconds ticked into minutes, the minutes into forty-five. His teeth wore into the wound on his thumb, blood tricking over his chin.

The door opened and Rogers-Steve-Not-Handler stepped into the room. He crossed the room in a few quick firm strides only faltering slightly when he saw Barnes’s thumb and fingers. He didn’t stop though. Gentle hands cupped Barnes’s face as Steve sank to his knees beside the bed. “Come on, buddy. Are you ready to get out of here?” He pulled Barnes’s hand down and squeezed it gently.

Barnes searched him hope blossoming. “I can go?”

“If you want,” Steve said. “I’ll walk you to the door myself and call you a cab. But I thought you might want to live with me. I’m not that great a cook but I have a few games we could play and I have a warm bed and I’ll protect you, buddy. I promise. No recalibration, no torture, no more locked rooms. I’ll help you. You’ll be safe and—“

Barnes threw himself forward into Steve’s chest. Strong arms wrapped around him as he buried his face into Steve’s shoulder. “You promise?” he gasped. “Promise, promise.”

Promise. Saad. Promesa.คำมั่นสัญญา. To assure someone they will definitely do, give, or arrange something. To undertake or declare that something would happen. To make an oath, a declaration that gives right to expect or claim.Steve promised. He pulled Barnes close – safe, secure – and let him listen to him breathing. His hand soothed up and down Barnes’s back. “I’ve got you, buddy,” he said.With his ear pressed against Steve’s chest, Bucky’s mind spun in circles. If Steve wasn’t lying then he wasn’t the Soldier waiting for recalibration, or the man on the mountain. He wasn’t the Soldier, and he didn’t have to be Bucky. “Who am I now?” he asked.“Whoever you want to be.” Steve’s voice rumbled under his ear.He wanted to be confident. Strong. Capable. He wanted to show Steve he wasn’t the sniveling coward hiding under the bed waiting for the handler to drag him out. He also wanted to stay right here, protected and safe and let Steve carry him for a while.

Barnes closed his eyes and gave himself to the count of five then pulled away. “I want to go with you,” he said. “But if I change my mind I can leave?”

Steve’s face twisted like he was happy and sad at the same time but nodded. “Just say the word and I’ll walk you to the front door.”

Barnes looked around the white cell. “I’m ready to go now.”

Steve stepped back to allow Barnes room to stand. Barnes picked up the Gummy Bear army and looked around for somewhere to put them. His scrubs didn’t have pockets. Steve held out a hand and left it hanging while Barnes studied him suspiciously. Now that Captain Rogers was Steve was Not Handler he didn’t need to obey him automatically. Finally he handed them over and watched like a hovering mother as Steve tucked them into his pockets.

The door yawned like the mouth of a monster ready to snap him up at any minute, but the minute his feet crossed the threshold of the prison he felt himself relax. His mind jerked, like a train changing tracks. The habits of the prisoner fell away.

His shoulders straightened, his head lifted. The trembling in his hands and legs subsided and his mind felt clearer. Fear receded the farther they moved away from the cell. Barnes’s movements firmed and he stretched his stride.

He was out.

_*_

His new room was next to Steve’s. He had a big soft bed with a blue and green-checkered blanket and four fluffy pillows. There was a soft red carpet beside the bed he could dig his toes into. Next to the door stood large brown cabinet doors big enough to hide in across from a window with tinted glass.

If he opened the door he’d step into a short hallway with cream-colored walls. If he walked three steps away from his door he’d see Steve’s room with his door open so Barnes knew he was welcome. Steve’s room was covered in clutter - paper, pencils, ink, and paint – but he made his bed to military specifications.

If he wanted to eat there was food in the cabinets. Water ran from the tap. The toilet paper in the bathroom was soft and thick. There was a hot shower with small blue flowers painted on white tiles. Forget-me-nots.

Barnes lifted his head from the pillow – as soft as a marshmallow and so warm – and got out of bed. The moon was beginning to sink. The world outside slept.

Tomorrow he’d meet with Sam for his bi-weekly session. They’d talk about how his day went and Sam would give him little tasks to do during the week. Some things he did without prompting – took a shower every two days, ate when he was hungry.

Other things were harder.

Therapy was hard. Steve's friend Sam pushed for Barnes to talk about what it was like in Hydra’s hands. Barnes was shamed when he talked about standing naked while people touched him. He was embarrassed to admit that he never fought back or ran away. He didn’t want to tell Sam about the targets or the nightmares or the times he woke up and longed for a few moments of peace so much he wanted to go back to being blank and empty. Sometimes Barnes’s memory got jumbled up and something that felt so true one day was revealed to be a lie two weeks later.

However Sam’s face never changed. He always listened quietly, only making gentle sounds to let Barnes know he was listening. He never denied anything Barnes said and always validated what he was feeling even if it was illogical. Feelings, Sam said, didn’t have a truth or a lie but simply existed.

The day after they talked about things things and after Barnes’s feelings and emotions had a chance to settle they'd meet again. Then they went over everything Barnes said and Sam helped Barnes work through it with facts and data.

This was when Sam explained about dehumanizing. He explained that Hydra didn’t make him not-a-person, but they treated him like an object which made him _feel_ non-human. “You’re feelings are real, which is why I’m not going to say you felt like an object, because that can disassociate you from your experience. I’m going to say you were an object. So I’m not going to say you’re person-like, I’m going to say you are a person, because that’s fact.

“People have been debating personhood for about as long as humans have been around. Is it intelligence, or ability, or self-awareness? Can there be greater people and lesser people? When does a person begin to exist? Hell, half of the arguments and wars we’ve fought, even the current debates over abortion and civil rights and race are about when and what personhood is. People used to say that black people like me were less of a person so they’d have an excuse to make us slaves.

“Just because you don’t feel like a human being right now doesn’t mean you aren’t one. Fact is you were born from a human mother and a human father. Far as I can see you’re as human as me and Steve.”

Sam helped him make a timeline of where he was and where he’d been. Sam explained that while recovery wasn’t linear and setbacks were just as important as moving forward, it helped to see how much he’d improved over time. It also helped him organize the disjointed memories in his head.

It cleared up the fact that Barnes’s wasn’t imagining his turmoil; that he had a _right_ to feel what he felt. It let him know he wasn’t weak or pathetic when he hid away in the closet to talk to his bears.

It helped him to hold onto the days when he felt like himself – when he felt strong, and capable, and rational, when he knew the words to say to make Steve smile – because it helped him know they’d come around again.

The best part though was leaving.

Whenever their hour or two hour session finished and Sam felt comfortable letting him go Barnes walked out of Sam’s apartment and straight to Steve who greeted him with Irish hot chocolate and a book which he’d read out loud. Steve and Barnes sat down together on the large green couch wrapped in blankets and pillows while Steve read. They covered _Watership Down_ and the _Little Britches_ series in two months.

Barnes opened his bedroom door and crept out to the living room. He walked around the perimeter of the room checking the locks on the doors and listening to the vents.

Moonlight lit the carpet with silver and pooled in the water in a leftover cup on the coffee table. Around the cup, Captain Yellow Bear and his men were laying siege on Steve’s action figures. Tony Stark made them small thimble helmets to match the army jackets Steve stitched for them. There were even different uniforms for the agents’ verses the soldiers.

A map was laid out across the table near the heap of blankets and couch pillows marked up in red and yellow as Steve and Barnes planned their summer wilderness getaway. Barnes had marked and circled the path to the cave carefully marking scattered mines in bright red just in case.

Barnes pulled the fuzzy blanket out of the jumble and twisted it around until he was in a felt cocoon. He shuffled over to the window seat and curled up, forehead pressed to the glass. Down below the city that never slept rolled over lazily, a few stray taillights disappearing into the darkness as the late night workers headed home.

“James Buchanan Barnes,” he said quietly, the now familiar rolling over his tongue like milk chocolate, almost too sweet. He closed his eyes. His memories were hazy. He knew his sisters names now, knew he loved them. The mix of love and anger against his dad roiled in his stomach, a match to the sickening feeling of pity and resentment toward his mother. For a lot of things he _knew_ they happened rather than remembered. He knew he fought in WWII, and he remembered mud between his toes – ice frosting his scope when Michael Wess’s head caught a stray bullet over the barbwire – but he didn’t remember the boat there or how he ended up the trench.

Sam said that was normal. Few people remembered their lives cleanly and siblings often remembered the same event two different ways. Brains processed memory and deleted facts it considered unimportant. Data and experiences changed memory like a potter changed clay.

Barnes considered. He remembered how Bucky felt about things. He was a happy man, always ready for a good joke, quick to laugh and a flash-pan temper. He liked church, liked the ritual and the confidence of knowing what he was _supposed_ to do even if he didn’t follow it. Sally Monroe’s red lipstick. He used to watch her across the schoolyard, but she never gave him the time of day.

In ever memory he had Steve was there. Steve’s grumpy face with lips thin and brow furrowed, Steve’s face when they rode the Cyclone all pinched and kind of green. Steve holding his sister back while Bucky screamed at his father. Steve and his mom making a bed for him on the couch after he ran away. Steve was his brother; closer than a friend, that kind of close where you handed the other person knives to rip your soul because you knew they’d never use them.

He wanted that back. Back when he was Hydra’s he wanted it. In the early days he remembers latching onto people like a kitten looking for its mama. He tried over and over to find the limb he was missing, that piece of his chest that ached. Someone he could trust. Some handlers used it, but they all turned it against him eventually.

He used to turn to his handler, mouth open to say _something_ only for it to fade away when he saw brown hair, or eyes the wrong shade of blue, or a frame too tall or too short. The words vanished as if stolen by the wind.

Instinct faded.

His reflection echoed the movement of his lips. _Ja_ , teeth clenched, lips pursed out, teeth open. _Mes_. Lips closed and pressed inward, opened to clenched teeth. _Bu_. Lips parted to a cushion of air and didn’t close for the force of sound pushed by the back of his tongue which rolls forward to hit the roof of his mouth, _ckan_. _Nan_ is a flicker of the tongue. _Barn_ a rapid movement of the jaw softened by the lingering tongue of _nes_. James Buchanan Barnes.

The cool of the glass soothed his headache.

A shadow trod silently into in the corner of his vision and moved in from the hallway to sit on the barren couch. Steve rested his weight on his elbows. He fiddled with the bears, absently shoving Agent Blue Bear closer to Soldier Bear and Captain Yellow Bear.

Barnes focused on the traffic below.

The reflection of Steve rubbed his eyes and yawned. “Did I wake you?” Barnes asked.

“Nah,” Steve rumbled, voice hoarse with sleep. “Was jus’ thinking.”

Liar. Barnes smiled at his reflection. His body loosened, instinctively trusting Steve to his back. They sat in companionable silence for a while.

For a moment, Barnes could see the future stretching out in front of them. He saw he and Steve in a holding pattern, Steve always there and Barnes a shattered wreck trying to pull himself together. There’d be good days. There’d be bad days, and eventually the good would out way the bad. They’d live out their days slow, content. Restless.

He wanted more.

“Steve,” Barnes said.

“Yeah, buddy,” Steve replied, straightening from where he’d begun to drop off. He blinked back sleep and focused on his friend. “Wassup.”

“Do you know why I ran?”

Steve stilled, suddenly wide awake and alert. His body language spoke of caution as he pushed himself all the way upright. “No,” he said finally. “We have theories, but…” he trailed off. “Do you want to tell me?”

Barnes watched him in the mirror of the window. The moonlight glinted off the edges of his metal hand. “You pulled it off. The scaffolding. You knew I’d come up swinging but you still helped me. The _moment_ you finished your mission you stopped hurting me. No one ever did that before.” The metal fingers curled and uncurled. “No one ever did that before. Helped when they could hurt.”

The Soldier had never experienced kindness before. He’d seen it on missions, sometimes. Sometimes the soldiers in his unit cared for wounded members or placed a comforting hand on the shoulder of a grieving rookie. The technicians ooh’d and awe’d when a female programmer got pregnant. They brought her hot chocolate and gave her the single rolling chair so she wouldn’t put pressure on her swollen ankles.

None of that kindness was spared for the Soldier because you didn’t caress a chair or a knife or a gun. You used it, cleaned it, and put it away.

The Soldier had liked that kindness. He’d wanted to protect the memory of it.

Barnes dug his fingers into his temple, and then lifted a finger to his teeth. A warm hand pulled it away before he drew blood, curled around his fist until it was safely wrapped in the only skin Barnes would never hurt. Steve sat down next to him on the window seat, Barnes’s hand trapped between his palms. His metal fist dropped back to his lap.

“I knew they’d take it away,” he told their hands. “I didn’t want to lose that.”

They sat silent except for the even exchange of breath. “I knew,” Barnes said suddenly. “I _knew_ they’d find me, that I’d lose and they’d take even more away because I ran but suddenly a small moment of kindness was worth an eternity of hell. So I ran.”

And the longer he stayed away the more he got back until the thought of losing everything was enough to chase the man from the Helicarrier even if he turned Barnes away.

“I didn’t let myself think of myself as…as James Buchanan Barnes. I didn’t think I deserved it. I thought that if I imitated what I saw the handlers do I’d learn how to be human. When I finally realized everything I’d done, everyone I killed…” his voice broke. “I wanted to die. So. Bad.”

Steve’s breath hitched. His hands clamped down tight on Barnes’s hands. Barnes tilted his head further into the window so he wouldn’t see Steve’s expression reflected in the window. “I figured remorse earned me the name Barnes.”

He focused hard on a silver car parked below. It looked like a toy; something he’d pick up with tweezers. Maybe if he focused hard enough on the reflection of the moon in the windshield the words wouldn’t tear him apart. “Do you think,” he whispered to the glass pretending it was a question between him and the moon. “Do you think I’ve earned the rest of my name?” He gathered his courage and looked at Steve. “Can I be Bucky now?”

Steve’s smiled bright and shaky. “Yeah, Buck.” he said against a throat full of tears. “You can be whoever you want to be.”

Bucky breathed out. “Promise?”

“Mmmhm.” Steve reached out and pulled Bucky into a hug. “I promise.”

Bucky Barnes rested his forehead against Steve’s clavicle, his cheek pressed against skin and soft cotton, the steady thrum of Steve’s heartbeat under his ear. He heard Steve’s breath hitch and warm salt-water drops hit his cheek. One hand rubbed a soothing pattern across the bumps of his spine and ribs. The other gripped his hand tightly, a thumb rubbing over the scarred imprint of Bucky’s teeth.

He breathed in cotton and sleepy warm skin; safe. He breathed out contentment.

Home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that's the end of this story. Bucky is obviously not okay yet, but this story was never about the full recovery as much as it was about coming home. Healing is a process that starts and stops and reverses and leaps forward and is rarely linear. 
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who read, commented, encouraged, critiqued, and left Kudos. You are the most amazing readers a writer could ask for. 
> 
> I will be writing more about the days to come for Steve and Bucky, but there have been some amazing writers who've covered the process better than I could ever hope to. 
> 
> The advice Sam gave Steve the previous chapter, and the discussion of emotion is based on some of my own discussions and experiences dealing with choices and emotion. The grocery store, for example, came from when my family was serving in Brazil and returned to the USA on furlough. The advice about removing the "I Feel" prefix to emotion came from discussions of shame, anxiety, depression and insecurity, as the I Feel can minimize the suffering of the person, and can distance both the speaker and the listener from the pain they are experiencing. Sometimes it's really good for forcing a person to realize exactly what they've been thinking about themselves. After all, saying "I feel like a monster" is much less shocking than "I'm a monster." 
> 
> The survival information in the first three chapters comes from experienced members of my family, survival manuals, and wilderness training. I want to emphasize once again DO NOT DO THIS AT HOME. 
> 
> I hope you all enjoyed this journey with me. Thank you so much once again and Merry Christmas!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Captain Yellow Bear & Soldier Bear (Капитан Желтый Медведь и Солдат Медведь)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7656538) by [alkharad](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alkharad/pseuds/alkharad), [Jasherk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jasherk/pseuds/Jasherk)
  * [[Podfic] Color by Numbers](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10947114) by [madnads](https://archiveofourown.org/users/madnads/pseuds/madnads)




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